The Metroid series took a little nap during the N64 era, with Nintendo unable or unwilling to release a single home console game for the franchise between the success of the SNES’s Super Metroid in 1994 and the GameCube’s Metroid Prime in 2002. So a fan is stepping in—and back in time—to make one for themselves.

What You Should Know About Mario Strikers' Big Free Update

CCShare SubtitlesOffEnglishShare this VideoFacebookTwitterEmailRedditLinkview videoWhat You Should Know About Mario Striker‘s Big Free Update

What you’re seeing here is the work of Luto Akino, who by day works as a programmer and indie developer, but who in his spare time has started cobbling together his vision for what an N64 Metroid game could or should have looked like.

Here’s a brief example, showing Samus rolling around and doing some shooting:

Here’s a rough clip showing what the morph ball looks like with 64-bit sensibilities:

And here’s a look at how the targeting system would work:

Now, as you can probably tell, this is about as rough as it gets. All we’ve seen Samus do is roll around and shoot for a bit, making this more of a tech demo than anything approaching a game. But Luto is serious about the whole thing, and continues to work on it, even going so far as to map out a plot for the thing (note that this is a translation from the original Spanish):

Who knows what’ll happen. Maybe he’ll finish the game one day and have the whole thing ruined by Nintendo’s lawyers. But even if this is all we ever get to lay our eyes on, it was still awesome to behold. Once you see that blocky Samus rolling around and shooting stuff in that N64 style, you can almost convince yourself this was actually a game you played in 1997, and just somehow forgot about for all this time. Or something that was shown off at a Japan-only games show in 1996, cancelled, and the only surviving record of it is some blurry VHS footage.