Good question! I’m not sure when the transition happened, but many of the earliest releases (like Super Mario Bros) tend to just squish the entire screen view and use frame blending/jittering to regain some hidden detail. It still looks bad though.
Later games seem to have manual effort put into them to avoid this, either the sprites have been remade with specific lines missing, or the screen has more scrolling or has been positioned differently to retain the original sprites. Metroid luckily falls into this category.