Metroid Prime GCN

Metroid Prime was a massive game during the GameCube era, generating a huge following and a sequel on the same system. Despite this, one glitch in the first entry which has seemingly gone unnoticed over the years has now reportedly been discovered by a Reddit user known as angelar_ who suffers from insomnia.

You see, one night when this individual was struggling to fall asleep, they decided to boot up Metroid Prime on GameCube for a bedtime play session. The starting area proved to be "very hypnotic" and they eventually nodded off while the game was still running. They did this a number of times and began to notice how Samus' gunship would "drift" – to the point it would breach the walls of the starting platform. After running some more tests, it was then confirmed the gunship had moved quite "a lot" in realtime over many hours.

Spot the difference
Image: Reddit

So, what's going on? A user in the same thread known as antidotecrk explained what is happening:

This actually has a very good explanation: Every rig has two roots, the world root simply named root and the actual root for the character called Skeleton_Root this allows the animation designers to animate freely while still allowing an actor to remain stationary, this is useful for cutscene cinematics, however if root were to drift, even slightly, that would cause the runtime to update the actor's position in relation to the world root bone, as it happens the gunship's idle animation has a root that very slightly move forward each time it loops, this coupled with time gives the resulting image.

Another user even noted how The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess had a similar glitch, and others elsewhere have said they've seen things like this in different games before.

The lovely folk over at GameXplain ran some tests on their own GameCube and found the gunship in Metroid Prime was indeed drifting. While it's still up for debate if this glitch is actually a new discovery or not, it's now at least been confirmed.

Will you be booting up your copy of Metroid Prime to see this for yourself? Let us know in the comments.

[source youtu.be, via reddit.com]