The Strength of Super Metroid‘s Soundtrack Is in Its Silences

By Maddy Myers | October 21, 2025 | 1:30pm

Video Games Features metroid

The Strength of Super Metroid‘s Soundtrack Is in Its Silences

There’s a lot to commend about Super Metroid’s soundtrack and overall sound design, but as someone who’s replayed the game multiple times, what I most notice about it is its use of silence—often in very specific moments—as a means for building tension. The music was composed by Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano, with Yamamoto also working on certain sound effects, like the baby Metroid’s varied emotive cries. The use of silence, and in particular two key moments when the baby Metroid cries out into that silence, is the secret to what makes Super Metroid so powerful.

In addition to pure silence, huge portions of the Super Metroid soundtrack make use of long, sustained, low notes that evoke the industrial sounds of a machine hum. There are also songs with very spare percussion intros, similarly allowing the musical score to sound more like the background noise of machines clanking, as opposed to recognizable tunes. It’s only when the actual melodies kick in that the player might realize that the sounds they were hearing were part of a musical score, not just sound effects that accompany whatever dangerous area Samus happens to be exploring. These minimalist songs, interspersed with specific moments of silence, allow the more high-octane and propulsive musical cues—during boss fights, timed escapes, and so on—to feel that much more dramatic.

The opening scenes of Super Metroid include some of its most memorable moments of ominous silence. The very beginning of the game does start with music; a strong, pulsing melody accompanies a few screens of text conveying a mission briefing from Samus about how she dropped off a baby Metroid—the last known existing Metroid—with scientists on a space station. But of course, as soon as Samus hops into her spaceship and departs from the space station, she gets a distress call from them and has to turn back around. Thus begins the actual game of Super Metroid, which starts off notably music-free.

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There is not a pure, undiluted silence when Samus Aran re-enters the science lab. But the emptiness of the hallways is underscored by a relative lack of sound; a distant, quiet alarm is going off, and there is a high machine-like hum in the background as well. Samus wanders hallway after hallway, her loud space boots tromping across floors and down stairs. Soon, she finds the room that once housed the baby Metroid; the massive glass tube where it resided has been smashed, the baby nowhere to be seen. Dead corpses of scientists litter the floor. Samus steps over the bodies to get across the room and into yet another hallway. But after she opens the door at the end of this hallway, all of the sound in the game cuts out. It’s pure silence now.

It’s a dark room, seemingly empty, except for a small tube containing the baby Metroid. It’s moving—still alive, safe! The player will probably prompt Samus to run towards the baby, hoping she’ll pick it up. But she won’t. Something is very wrong. Samus can tell, even if we the player cannot. The silence stretches on. The baby Metroid cries out softly once, twice. And yet Samus waits.

Then, in the darkness of the room, a glowing red eye appears. The hulking dragon-like body of Ridley fades into view. One of his purple claws is wrapped around the canister with the baby Metroid inside. Samus Aran can fire on Ridley as fast as she likes; he will always escape with the baby. This is one of the game’s few scripted sequences. There’s no sequence-breaking trick here, no alternative version of Super Metroid that could be possible for somebody skilled enough to defeat Ridley this early on and save the baby Metroid from its fate. No matter what, Ridley gets away with the baby, triggers the space station’s self-destrust sequence, and flies off to the planet Zebes.

Because Super Metroid has so little actual dialogue, other than the opening text crawl and some more on-screen text at the end of the game, the developers must tell the story of Samus, her adversaries, and the baby Metroid through sights and sounds alone. The sounds are therefore as important as the sights in order to convey the drama of this story. To go from the minimalist soundscape of the mysteriously empty space station laboratory, then to the room of corpses, and finally to the dead silence of a dark room with only the baby Metroid inside—it’s a perfect series of ominous snapshots. Spooky music would not have had the same effect, especially for the moment when the baby Metroid starts crying into the silence. Plus, when Ridley slides out of the shadows and the boss fight music finally kicks in, lasting through the fight and Samus escaping the space station before it explodes, the intensity of the tone shift is just right. By which I mean, the entire sequence feels extremely tense, as it should.

When Samus Aran’s ship lands on Zebes, Super Metroid makes use of silence yet again. But this time, it’s part of the composition of the song that accompanies Crateria, the first area of Zebes that Samus explores. Technically, there is a song that plays throughout this entire sequence. But the song, especially its opening, is long, low notes broken up by beats of silence. It’s haunting. And it’s an appropriately bittersweet accompaniment for Samus returning to Zebes yet again—the planet where she grew up, now overrun by Space Pirates, and not for the first time (the original Metroid also has this premise).

Once Samus actually runs into her first round of Space Pirates on Zebes, a new song kicks in, and it’s off to the races, both melodically and combat-wise. But whenever Samus enters an item room or takes a long elevator ride, the Super Metroid soundtrack dials it back down to either industrial hums and high-pitched beeps; these moments are some of the few “breaks” that Samus has from the action of defending her home planet and searching for the baby Metroid. In these moments, the lack of highly melodic accompaniment is less ominous and more just a signal of safety. By contrast, the pulsing beats of enemy-filled areas and boss fights emphasize that Samus has work left to do.

There is another notable scene with silence in it in Super Metroid, and that, of course, is its climactic ending. Similar to the opening scene with Ridley kidnapping the baby Metroid, the final fight with Mother Brain also includes a narrative sequence during which Samus (and by extension, the player) is powerless to intervene and can only watch, helpless, as the tragic events unfold.

The final fight with Mother Brain in Super Metroid is very different from the Mother Brain boss battle in the original Metroid (as well as its 2004 remake, Metroid: Zero Mission). In that game, Mother Brain is a brain in a jar, and she’s stationary. Samus has to avoid projectiles, which is irritating, but aside from that, it’s just Samus firing off missiles at Mother Brain until she dies (or so we think). In Super Metroid, Mother Brain has become a hulking cyborg monstrosity. She is not just a brain in a jar; she is an abomination. She towers over Samus now, and she has some new and different attack patterns.

At the outset of this battle, the player might still be under the impression that even if Mother Brain looks different, she can be defeated in the same way as her original form. Normally, with a Metroid boss, you just hit it a bunch of times with your best weaponry until it dies; sometimes there’s a gimmick, but it’s not too complicated. Super Metroid’s Mother Brain fight, on the other hand, is designed for Samus to lose. (Skilled players can, apparently, damage Mother Brain enough to soft-lock yourself out of getting to the end of the game, but it’s clearly not the intended outcome since, well, you can’t beat the game if you do this.)

Partway through the fight, Mother Brain will start firing off a mysterious, rainbow-colored beam. This beam is extraordinarily powerful. Samus’ health will drain downward, more and more, until she’s almost dead. Eventually, Samus will be on the very brink of death, with only the last dregs of her final energy tank remaining.

But then, the baby Metroid appears—not so baby anymore. A huge and impressive Metroid now, it latches itself onto the head of the Mother Brain monstrosity and starts sucking. Mother Brain becomes gray, dessicated… perhaps even defeated. The baby Metroid then whirls briefly around in a large circle before descending upon Samus and wrapping its tentacles around her. But it’s not sucking her dry; somehow, the baby Metroid is recharging all of Samus’ energy tanks. Unfortunately, Mother Brain is not dead after all. She straightens back up. The music reaches a fever pitch of desperate, clanging chords as Mother Brain begins firing on the baby Metroid. But the baby Metroid stayed locked onto Samus, whose health bar keeps on ticking up, up, up.

Finally, Samus’ health bar is full. The baby Metroid detaches itself, then moves as though to get away. But a final blast from Mother Brain is all it takes. The music drops out completely. The baby Metroid’s final death scream is into the silence. It explodes, also into silence. And then softly, one of the few hopeful-sounding melodies from Crateria kicks in as a newly renewed Samus stands up. It turns out that the baby Metroid didn’t just give Samus her health back; the baby also gave Samus the Hyper Beam, the same rainbow beam that Mother Brain had been firing on her. It’s only with this beam that Samus can finally defeat Mother Brain and honor the baby Metroid’s sacrifice.

But the baby Metroid is still dead. And its cries into the silence, just like at the beginning of the game when Ridley first captured it, are truly upsetting. It makes total sense that composer Kenji Yamamoto also worked on the Metroid’s crying sounds, because these sounds are pivotally important to the story. And, I would argue, they wouldn’t be even close to as effective if they were accompanied by music. These two moments deserve the intensity of silence to background them, and they underscore the tragedy of the baby Metroid’s story—a story told without any words. I know I’m not the only person who’s cried at the ending of Super Metroid, and that combination of music, sound design, and intentional silence is a big part of why.

Maddy Myers has worked as a video game critic and journalist since 2007; she has previously worked for Polygon, Kotaku, The Mary Sue, Paste Magazine, and the Boston Phoenix. She co-hosts a video game podcast called Triple Click, as well as an X-Men podcast called The Mutant Ages. When she is not writing or podcasting, she composes electro-pop music under the handle MIDI Myers. Her personal website is midimyers.com.