Michael Kelbaugh

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“	My job is to try to mediate between our friends at NCL and Retro staff. I need to try to train Retro staff - or at the time, needed to train Retro staff to think like a Nintendo developer.	„
—Michael Kelbaugh^[1]

This article is about Michael Kelbaugh of Retro Studios. For the Galactic Federation Marine, see Michael Kelbaugh (Marine).

Michael Kelbaugh is the President and CEO of Retro Studios in Austin, Texas. Kelbaugh was also the executive producer of the Metroid Prime Trilogy. He appeared in the Developer's Voice featurette promoting the Trilogy.

Screens feature-36592 — Kelbaugh with an *Echoes* standee.

By early 2000, Kelbaugh was involved in nearly all of Nintendo's bigger first- and second-party releases, working to manage and remove bugs for the QA cycle before the games shipped to retail. Even as recently as 2002, he was still overseeing testing at Nintendo's American headquarters as Testing Director for the just-released Metroid Prime.

Metroid Prime series[]

Prime's release marked a turning point for developer Retro Studios, and with Nintendo's backing, they were able to make two sequels, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and later Metroid Prime 4 and Metroid Prime Remastered. Before the release of the follow-up, Retro president and founder Jeff Spangenberg sold his part of the company to Nintendo. Two years later, Kelbaugh was appointed the new president and began overseeing the rest of Retro's work on the Prime franchise. Kelbaugh succeeded Steve Barcia as president. Kelbaugh assisted in the composition of Corruption's music, playing bass.^[2]

GameSpot interview[]

Transcribed from this video.

“

We really, um... we are a Nintendo studio. When I think of who made Metroid Prime 3 I think of the Metroid Prime team. I don't really think of Retro as an individual entity, of our friends at Nintendo as an individual entity, I think of the Metroid Prime team. Some of that team happens to be in Japan, some of it happens to be in Redmond, Washington and we all get together a lot to build great games.

It's not a typical developer-publisher situation because Retro is Nintendo and we are constantly held to that same bar that EAD is held to, that all of the Japanese developers that make Nintendo games are held to, constantly.

I really want to stress it's a team effort. It's not Retro's ideas and NCL's ideas, it's really how do we make the best game and how do we utilize everybody's skills to do that?

We don't consider ourselves a Western developer, we consider ourselves a Nintendo developer. We just happen to be in Texas. Understanding Nintendo's design philosophies, what they care about quality is absolutely powerful, because if you approach a Nintendo title with the Western style of development mentality you will not succeed. Every little pixel counts and that is much different from the way Western developers develop games.

„

Trivia[]

Michael Kelbaugh appears on a list of deceased Federation Marines in the G.F.S. Valhalla trailer video that was shown in the Metroid Prime 3: Corruption Preview.
Michael Kelbaugh had previously worked in the creation of the Donkey Kong Country series while he was employed at Nintendo of America. However, he is uncredited in the first game.
Kelbaugh disliked Jack Mathews' first design for the Dark Visor, due to the "trails" it had, which looked 16 bit to him.^[3]