The first episode of Journey to MARS, a behind-the-scenes documentary about the independent Brazilian metroidvania MARS 2120 has been released, which you can check out below.

Episode 1, The Creation of MARS 2120, shows the previous and initial steps that led to the desire to develop a game almost four times greater in complexity, time, cost and effort than the largest project developed so far by the small independent studio.

It took five years of work, with a core team of just six people, from the very first idea to the game finally being certified for all the platforms on which it will be released in 2024.

With a tradition of working with more retro games, both with its own titles and with the publication of titles from other independent studios and notable franchises from the past, such as Top Gear from the 1992 Super Nintendo, the studio wanted to work for the first time on a title with more complex and non-linear gameplay. The natural choice, apart from the developers’ passion for the genre, was a sci-fi themed metroidvania.

The project also involved the dream of taking a bolder step where the studio set itself the technical challenge of migrating from the Unity engine to Unreal.

MARS 2120‘s sci-fi theme is the direct result of the developers’ personal influences and tastes in the form of great sci-fi authors, landmark films in the genre, such as Alien and Total Recall, and also, of course, console sci-fi classics such as Metroid itself, one of the project’s major references. No wonder MARS 2120 has been called “the Brazilian Metroid Dread”.

The Journey to Mars documentary will have four episodes in total that will be released gradually until the game’s release. Episode 2, available soon, will show the creation of the game’s art and game design process.

MARS 2120 will be released in the second half of 2024 for PC (Steam and Epic Store), Xbox One, XBox Series X/S, Playstation 4, Playstation 5 and Nintendo Switch.