Retro Studios, the team behind Metroid Prime and the two Donkey Kong Country Returns games, has made a big hire as it works on Metroid Prime 4. VGC has announced that the studio has brought on Bharathwaj Nandakumar, a long-time Activision veteran who has worked on the Call of Duty: Black Ops series.
According to VGC, Nandakumar was most recently credited as lead engineer on Black Ops 4. Across the past decade, he has worked on the whole series. He was reportedly brought into the Nintendo-owned studio back in April, but it’s only being reported on now.
Retro Studios is working on Metroid Prime 4, but this was not always the case. In fact, the game was being worked on by another team until early 2019, when development was restarted with the original trilogy developer at the helm.
Since then, it’s been reported that about half the Metroid Prime 3 team is still at the studio, and that the director of Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze was also working there again after a stint at Super Lucky’s Tale developer Playful Corp.
It is not actually clear whether Nandakumar is working on Metroid Prime 4, as we’re not sure if Retro Studios is working on another game. The new Metroid Prime was announced at E3 2017, but no gameplay footage has been shown from any iteration of the game as of yet.
Hopefully we’ll see something of the game soon–the last Metroid Prime game was the underwhelming Metroid Prime: Federation Force for the 3DS in 2016.
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