Total bummer, Nintendo.  Total bummer.

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As one of the most important aspects of any video game, level design is a fascinating concept to study.  We can chart its progression from 2D into 3D, from simple linear stages into vast, sprawling environments.  In doing so, the general trend of 3D games begins to come into focus — and in some cases, it’s not such a pretty sight.  Sometimes we have to look backwards to see how we should move forwards.

Open world games have risen in popularity steadily since the release of Grand Theft Auto III, which not only spawned several sequels, but far too many cheap knock-offs and shoddy cash-ins.  Still, the goal of these games is admirable: they are presenting you with not a level to progress through, but a world to explore.  It’s a way to accomplish a level of escapism that smaller, more constrained games can’t match, but it’s a tricky thing to pull off.  The key is being able to form an explorable world with a scope so vast that players won’t feel as though the constraints of the area are too artificial — but size must be balanced with enough memorable locations to make the world feel alive.

Ultimately, games such as Bethesda’s Oblivion and Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV can’t live up to both ends of the deal.  Oblivion is, even now, nearly three years after its release, a huge, beautiful game world.  But one grassy green hill looks like the next.  And the next.  The sense of exploration gets lost in the scope without delivering enough of what’s ultimately the most important thing: design.

Which, in my long-winded and roundabout way, brings us to Super Metroid.  Compared to GTA or Oblivion, Super Metroid is laughably miniscule.  It’s 2D.  It can’t compete with the miles and miles of explorable land and cityscape in Cyrodil or Liberty City.  But it just might have the best level design of any video game ever made.

Unlike its grandiose 3D brethren, Super Metroid is an incredibly tightly-packed world.  The attention to detail is truly incredible — as a sort of forerunner to the open world games of today, Super Metroid encourages, and, in fact, requires, considerable exploration.  Every new ability acquired, every new item found, opens a new path somewhere, but it’s rarely blatant.  It’s up to you to hunt down secret tunnels and discover how to combine abilities to reach new areas.

The 2D world snakes outwards, but as you gain new powers, it brilliantly meshes together into one massive, cohesive unit.  Areas that were once challenging become easy to traverse in seconds thanks to newer weapons and armor.  And yet each explorable region of the planet Zebes is incredibly unique and memorable in one way or another.  It’s that perfect attention to detail that truly sets the game world apart.

Each area’s remarkable distinction also helps Super Metroid deliver an incredibly atmospheric experience.  With 16 bit graphics and sound that pales in comparison to the might of Dolby Digital, Super Metroid rivals any game made today in ambiance — and exceeds most.  It’s somber, chilling, and ornately detailed, leaving you slightly on edge all the time.  You’re the intruder on this alien world, and it’s not a friendly one.

Super Metroid also boasts one of the most clever, devious examples of game design in the past two decades.  Every time I scrutinized an area for any possible secret, looked in some innocuous out-of-the-way place, and was rewarded for my efforts, I found myself discovering the next item I needed to advance.  No game has ever rewarded exploration so well or so thoroughly, and the vast number of upgrades available makes checking every corner an addictive process.  Some items won’t even show up on a scan that reveals invisible shit — when you can hide something that well in your game and have people find it, you know you’ve done something right.

I delayed fully experiencing Super Metroid for far too many years, despite knowing how great a game it was.  And it exceeded my expectations.  While there will always be games I enjoy more, I don’t think a game made since 1994 has yet rivaled the level design of Super Metroid.  I guess perfection is pretty hard to top.

Growing up tragically deprived of video games until somewhere around the age of 10, I have the unshakable feeling that I missed out on some essential skillset that I’ll never be able to fully make up for.  Additionally, the intermittent exposure I had to gaming up to that point narrowed my enthusiasm for the genre to such a degree that I had no clue what I was missing out on.

It all started with Sonic the Hedgehog.  I don’t remember why, or how, but but my first real encounter with console gaming was the original Sonic on the Genesis.  If it had happened to be Mario, my retro gaming ineptitude might not exist as it does today.  Alas, fate caught me in its insidious web.

I loved Sonic.  I wasn’t very good at it, but that hedgehog had attitude.  Not that I knew what a hedgehog was, either.  And my parents weren’t quite down with videogames.  They did their best to encourage me to spend my time other ways, reading or playing outdoors like good little boys should.  Their main method of encouraging me not to play games was to simply not buy me a game console.

This worked pretty well.

But every year, for my birthday, a family friend — whose inner child was, more aptly, an outer child — would go out of her way to rent me a Sega Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog.  And for a few days, every year, I’d play as far into the game as I could make it (which probably wans’t very far) and then do it all over again.

Fast forward a few years — the Nintendo 64 has been released, and an older cousin sends me his old Sega Genesis.  And, gradually, as I owned my own console and began saving up money to buy my own games, I became a gamer.  Pretty soon the Genesis wasn’t enough to contain me — I hoarded my money until I could afford an N64, and my allegiance smoothly transitioned from Sega to Nintendo.  Unfortunately, I missed everything else.

Hell, I hardly even touched a Super Nintendo for the full span of my childhood.  By the time videogames had their hooks into me, my friends were playing Saturn and N64 games.  When the Super Nintendo was dominant in the 16-bit era, I had a laughable knowledge of the wonders it contained within its grey shell.  I distinctly remember listening to kids at the lunch table discussing games, and at the time I had no idea that “Super Nintendo,” “Super NES,” and “SNES” all meant the same thing.

It wasn’t until years later that  I began to understand the sheer volume of unmissable games that I had unforgivably missed without a clue.  You could write a book on game design based on Mario alone, and the Super Nintendo’s vast library contained so much beyond Super Mario World.

But now I’m all-too aware of the treasures of the 16-bit era still waiting to be plundered.  And I still enjoy old games — in many cases, more than new ones.  But here lies the rub — I’m tremendously bad at them.

Somehow, I missed out on something important as a child.  I’m not sure what it was, exactly.  Maybe it was simply the skills gained by playing games ad infinitum until every nook had been explored, every secret uncovered, and every level mastered.  I didn’t get them.  Or perhaps it was something more innate, a magical familiarity with the medium absorbed through prolonged contact with Nintendo’s classic controller.

Either way, I didn’t get it.  And now, when I fire up games like Mega Man 2, my self-image as a gamer crumbles.  More than crumbles.  Implodes.  Even Super Mario World, a game children could finish in an afternoon, utterly torments me.  In fact, I’d challenge anyone to find someone worse at 2D Mario than me.  I’d go into that one pretty confident in my own ability to utterly fail.

At 20 years old I’m still trying to learn how to ride this particular bicycle.  it’s like being a kid, wobbly and unsure, but without the finely-honed instinct of youth.  And there’s a diamond in the rocky terrain of my fail-strewn path — I can still discover, with child-like glee, games that wore out their freshness for my peers years ago.  There are still moments for me to unearth that convey an incredible amount of emotion with so little.  When a midi and a sprite can make you feel more than the most incredibly choreographed, orchestrated and narrated games of the current generation, you know there’s something magic there that is rarely recaputed in 2008.  And when I dig back into the past and experience one of those moments, it’s like Christmas every time, and that is something I wouldn’t trade the world for.