Unsurprisingly this has led to some wondering about the status of the game, and whether or not something might have happened to it. Thankfully it seems that Nintendo is still very much hard at work on it, according to Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime who spoke to Mashable in an interview.
When asked about the status of Metroid Prime 4 and a potential release date, Fils-Aime said, “Internally, we have expectations about when [Metroid Prime 4] is going to be released. We haven’t announced it, but yeah, the game is well in development.” He also talked about how Nintendo usually likes to keep a relatively short window between announcement and release, but also stated how they think that sometimes it’s important to let gamers know that a game is in the works, even if it won’t be released anytime soon.
According to Fils-Aime, “There are times for strategic reasons that we believe it’s important to message that a game is coming. We did that years and years ago with Zelda. We were messaging a new Zelda experience back during the days of the Wii U… It really depends on the game, it depends on the type of development that it’s going through, and it depends on how we feel the consumer is going to respond to the particular message.”