Metal Gear Solid (1998)
Directed and designed by Hideo Kojima
Produced by Hideo Kojima and Motoyuki Yoshioka
Written by Hideo Kojima and Tomokazu Fukushima
Art by Yoji Shinkawa
It took Kojima 8 years to return with the third game in the Metal Gear series, and its first 3D title, Metal Gear Solid (because, y’know, 3D=solid, opening the door for a perfect pun). Metal Gear Solid was the true introduction of Kojima’s vision to the West, and it was hugely successful, receiving high critical praise, selling over seven million copies, and kicking off a franchise (whether Kojima wanted that or not!). The game is now considered an all-time classic, and for good reason — the world had never seen a game like this before.
Metal Gear Solid takes place 6 years after the events of Metal Gear 2. It begins exactly how you’d expect, based on previous titles. Solid Snake (who is now modeled after Jean-Claude van Damme’s body and Christopher Walken’s face) infiltrates a terrorist-occupied remote compound (this time in Alaska) via water in order to rescue civilian prisoners and stop the terrorists. He’s once again accompanied on his codec by Colonel Roy Campbell and Master Miller, plus a few new characters. Naomi Hunter gives you medical advice, Mei Ling helps you with the radar system she invented and tells you famous quotations when you save your game, and Nastasha Romanenko informs you about the items and weapons you find in the field. More characters are introduced along the way, including the fan-favorite otaku scientist Otacon.
You can call these people whenever you have a question, and there are hours and hours of recorded dialogue with them — far more than appeared in the earlier titles. It’s considerably more story heavy than its predecessors — over a third of the play time is spent in cutscenes or codec calls. This was the first Metal Gear title with voice acting, which makes sitting in those calls considerably more enjoyable. David Hayter’s gritty, slimy voice acting brought Solid Snake to life in a whole new way. The sound design is also excellent — the tritone that plays when you get spotted became an iconic staple of the series. The music is filled with memorable themes, and its synths are often icy in a way that perfectly reflects the chilled Alaskan environment. The visuals are similarly moody. All of this comes together to create a strong atmosphere.
Kojima felt that ‘if the player isn’t tricked into believing that the world is real, then there’s no point in making the game’. As such, he brought the team on field trips to California to visit military training centers and work with SWAT teams and weapons experts so the team could learn how guns, explosives, and vehicles really worked. All of this made it into Romanenko’s dialogue, which surely featured the most excessively in-depth explanations of weaponry to make its way into a game yet — a level of gun fetishism that was surely meant to be ridiculous parody. This became part of the series formula, as the next few titles also featured characters whose primary purpose was increasingly excessive explanations of the features and applications of the game’s arsenal.
It’s interesting how much this feels like a 3D update of all of Kojima’s ideas from the 80s games. Alert states with a countdown timer? Check. Lasers that set off alarms? Check. Guiding a remote control rocket to blow up an electrical panel in a different room in order to turn off an electrified floor? Check. Keys that change shape and turn into different keys when exposed to different temperatures? Check. Running around under a cardboard box, battling a crew of mercenary bosses, singlehandedly fighting a tank and helicopter, using radar to sneak around enemies with narrow vision cones, avoiding security cameras, using cigarettes to reveal hidden lasers, waiting for alerts to time out… all present. Even the plot has some similarities — the scientist who designed the Metal Gear plays a major role, an ally betrays you, and the big bad presenting a nuclear threat to the world is Big-Boss-adjacent… It really is just Metal Gear 2 remade in 3D, but with a new setting and levels and a much more complex plot.
Of course, there are new elements as well. Part of this is the camera —the perspective is still fixed, and largely overhead, but it’s a bit more dynamic now. You can look around your environment in first person (but not move or aim) and peek around corners (though it takes quite a hefty combination of buttons to truly take advantage of this function). There are new gameplay mechanics, like needing to take a drug to steady your hands while aiming a sniper rifle. Then there are the inventive boss battles — most notably, the Psycho Mantis fight, which breaks the fourth wall. First, the boss reads your memory card, commenting on what other games you’ve been playing — then the game requires you to change which port your controller is plugged into to do any damage. Sadly, this causes difficulty with certain modern systems, and was altered for the PC version, but it blew many minds at the time.
Sometimes it almost feels like the game was simply a ploy to make kids watch archival footage-laden educational videos about nuclear proliferation. The text before the credits roll gives you the main takeaway: ‘In the 1980’s, there were more than 60,000 nuclear warheads in the world at all times. The total destructive power amounted to 1 million times that of the Hiroshima A-bomb. In January 1993, START2 was signed and the United States and Russia agreed to reduce the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 3500–3000 in each nation by December 31, 2000. However, as of 1998, there still exists 26,000 nuclear warheads in the world.’
Of course, those statistics have changed today — less than half that amount of nuclear warheads still exist in the world, mostly owned by the US and Russia. But that’s still a truly massive amount of destructive power! I first played this game in high school, and it truly was an educational and chilling experience. I felt particularly compelled by the game’s ideology and intent to educate — I’d never experienced an activist game, and was glad such a thing existed (and still am!). It showed me that games could be more than a mindless diversion.
You could argue that this game is like the Watchmen of video games — it introduced philosophical ideas to a genre that was formerly largely devoid of them. Like Watchmen, Metal Gear Solid is all about tearing down the idea of the action hero, asking what we’re really glorifying with that trope and why we’re doing it. To get this point across, it leans heavily into ludonarrative dissonance. It’s possible to stealth your way around the grunts, but the player is forced to kill the bosses and then chastised for doing so. Instead of letting you forget the brutality of what’s being simulated, it leans into it. These characters aren’t just pixels on a screen — they’re actual people, and you just hurt them.
The plot is also an examination of the roles of soldiers and scientists — what it means to be these things, how they affect the world, and what their responsibilities are. Ultimately, it’s all about human connection, and how many of the people in these roles are avoiding it in a way that ends up doing huge harm to others. The message to the players is clear: turn off your console, go outside, and connect with people. Actually live your life! All of this is delivered in the context of a ridiculously over the top action story involving cyborg ninjas, nanomachines, psychics, and giant bipedal robots. Does it work? Mostly. There are certainly a few eye-rolling moments, but it’s easy to forgive them given the age of the game and how much it gets right. Overall, it’s a remarkable success.
An expanded version of the game entitled Metal Gear Solid: Integral was released the following year. The most notable addition was the inclusion of a ‘VR Disc’, which was also issued as a standalone title under the name Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions. It included a VR training mode with 300 missions divided into four categories: Sneaking, Weapons, Advanced, and Special. The first 3 categories are relatively rote tests of the game’s mechanics, and are quite welcomed given how sparingly many of them were utilized in the actual game (in fact, it takes longer to complete these missions than it does to complete the campaign). The ‘Special’ category gets a bit more creative, including encounters with flying saucers and giant soldiers. Integral also featured a retooled version of the main campaign with different enemy placements, developer commentary, and even a first person mode.
1998 was the year the stealth genre took off in mainstream gaming. The first 3D stealth game, Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, came out a few months before Metal Gear Solid, but the latter quickly surpassed Tenchu in popularity. The year was rounded out by the first ever first person stealth game, Thief: The Dark Project, firmly establishing the genre as viable and opening the door for franchises like Hitman, The Operative: No One Lives Forever, and Deus Ex to appear in 2000. Metal Gear Solid remains the most successful and widely celebrated of these early 3D stealth titles.
Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (2004)
Directed by Carey Murray
Produced by Hideo Kojima, Yoshikazu Matsuhana, and Dennis Dyack
Kojima was a fan of developer Silicon Knights, who had most notably worked on Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, so he had them develop a remake of Metal Gear Solid for the Gamecube in the Metal Gear Solid 2 engine. He was also a fan of Japanese action director Ryuhei Kitamura, so he had Kitamura direct the cutscenes. The result followed the design and script of the original exactly (albeit with an extended intro sequence), and Yoji Shinkawa returned to do the art design. The English voice acting was all re-recorded using the same actors (as the increased audio quality of the Gamecube revealed defects in the original audio), replacing the regional accents of several characters with American accents. New music was also composed for the game.
Nonetheless, the new graphics and gameplay mechanics changed the feel and tone of the game considerably. Many mechanics were brought over from Metal Gear Solid 2, including first person aiming, hiding in lockers, hanging off railings, holding up guards, and allowing enemy soldiers to communicate with each other. However, the levels in Metal Gear Solid 2 were designed with all of this in mind, often focusing on tight corridors to utilize all of these mechanics. The unchanged levels here were not, meaning that these changes made the game considerably easier than the original version (aside from its oddly frustrating opening area), especially in some boss battles. The new AI mechanics compensate for that just a little bit, but not sufficiently.
Given that the game is really all about the story, this isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself. The tonal changes present a larger problem. Kitamura initially tried to imitate the original cutscenes, but Kojima instructed him to remake them in his own style, which ended up being extremely over the top and heavily reliant on bullet time, which was all the rage in the wake of The Matrix. The original game was already teetering on the edge of absurdity, but this change pushed it straight over the edge. In addition to that, the new sterile grey-heavy graphics and more ‘epic’ soundtrack feel less moody than the original — it loses a lot of the original’s appealing atmosphere. As such, I don’t think this remake has aged particularly well — there’s little reason to play it over the original, which holds up just fine.
