Legend of The Snake Eater

How Metal Gear Solid 3 pushed the creative boundaries of video games

Snake Eater was the first Metal Gear game I ever played. I didn’t expect much from what I had thought was an old third-person shooter. Kojima Productions proved me wrong. What I found was a deeply complex and captivating experience that stunned me with its story and characters. I became immediately hooked on the Metal Gear Solid series from then on. MGS3 is a beautifully-crafted game that skews the secret agent clichés to leave you with something wholly unique and entirely unforgettable.

You are Naked Snake. He is a pivotal character in the overall franchise, influencing many of the future events in the series. But instead of sneaking through futuristic laboratories to destroy robots and mechs, you instead travel through a Russian rainforest. You’re hunting down a nuclear-equipped tank called that Shagohod. The fact that MGS3 is set decades into the past frees it, to some extent, from shackles that may otherwise constrain the events here. This story feels fresh and independent from the baggage it may otherwise have inherited from games set later in the chronology. And although you could argue that MGS as a series has always featured an element of camp, MGS3 takes this to a high art form.