Castlevania producer and Symphony of the Night lead Koji "Iga" Igarashi said he wasn't inspired by Metroid, but rather Zelda when he rejuvenated the series as an exploration-based affair.
Iga - who recently departed from Konami - revealed this fun fact today at a GDC panel attended by Eurogamer. The legendary developer further explained that he wanted a game that lasted longer than a couple of hours - as was the case with many stage-based action games at that time. "In japan there were lots of games traded into game shops the day they came out," he said, before adding that he wanted to make the value of games closer to that of films, which lasted about the same amount of time, but cost about a sixth as much.
He then looked at Zelda for inspiration, as that game had a lot of exploration and backtracking that would increase the play time. Iga decided to add experience points and a light RPG system to incentivise retreading the same territory many times.
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