YouTube’s ‘philstephes’ is currently working on a full fledged Metroid Prime remake for the PC. As we all know, Metroid Prime came out exclusively on the Nintendo GameCube and was never ported to any other platform apart from the Nintendo Wii. However, this may change as philstephes is building a proper PC version via reverse engineering.

Now I can guarantee you that Nintendo will take this project down. The fact that philstephes uses reverse engineering to build this fan free PC game is what will trigger Nintendo to send him a C&D letter. That and the fact that it will be a free game.

Philstephes has shared a video showing the current state of this Metroid Prime PC remake. While the game is still rough around the edges, it shows some of the implemented features such as morphball, platforms and cutscenes.

Unfortunately, this WIP build is not available for download so there is no way to actually play the game. To be honest, we believe that philstephes should had waited before showing this Metroid Prime PC remake to the public. Then again, this is a really impressive achievement – even in its current state – so it may also impress some game companies.

Anyway, it will be really cool if Nintendo does not shut it down, but this is Nintendo we’re talking about. And since the big N sued emulation websites, we are pretty sure that they are not fine with indie developers building such free fan remakes, even though this project does not use any materials from the original game!

UPDATE:

Phillip Stephens got in touch with us and had this to say:

“You clearly don’t understand the point or goal of this project, nor do you even understand that what we’re doing is perfectly legal. As long as we don’t distribute any of Nintendo’s assets we’re not at risk of Nintendo’s “Legal ninjas”

Also, this project is free in the sense that anyone can download the source or binary it in no sense is a “free version of Metroid Prime” it requires a legally purchased and dumped iso. By your logic ioquake3 is illegal because it makes quake3 free.”

Now we’ve seen similar projects, that do not distribute any original assets, getting shut down by companies due to using their IPs. Companies can shut down projects that feature completely new assets when there are references to characters, names, designs, etc. A perfect example is the fan-made KOTOR game in Unreal Engine 4 – that would also require the original game – which was shut down by LucasFilms.