Zoey 101

Metroid is a Nintendo franchise which revolves around the space-faring bounty-hunting exploits of a woman named Samus Aran. The original Metroid was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1987, and it was considered state-of-the-art for its time because of several elements of design: It featured a labrynthine world in which the player chooses which direction to explore, making it one of the first highly non-linear game experiences on a home console; It was one of the earliest games to feature a password system (and in fact it had a saved-game slot system in its Japanese release on the Famicom Disk System); and in a landmark moment in game history, it was revealed at the end of the game that the playable character is female, an unusual concept for videogame characters at the time. It has remained one of the most popular games from the NES era. Metroid was expanded and developed as a franchise with the releases of the follow-ups Metroid II: Return of Samus for Game Boy in 1991 and Super Metroid for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super NES) in 1994, and they incorporated and introduced many elements that can be associated with Metroid-style gameplay. Super Metroid, in fact, was declared by issue #150 of game magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly to be the single greatest game of all time.