Sneak Attack Prior to Metal Gear Solid, "stealth" games were a barely-noticeable blip on the gaming radar. Afterward, games that either revolved around stealth or had stealth elements included Beyond Good and Evil, Boktai, Chicken Run GBC, Cy Girls, Disaster Report, GTA: San Andreas, Halo, Headhunter: Redemption, The Hulk, James Bond: Everything or Nothing, Manhunt, Metroid: Zero Mission, Mission: Impossible, No One Lives Forever, An early game to incorporate stealth gameplay, the Sentinel required you to sneak up on the enemy by taking cover behind rocks and trees as you climbed a hill. Paper Mario, Phantasy Star Online Ep I&II;, Red Faction, Rogue Ops, Second Sight, Shadow of Rome, Sly Cooper, Splinter Cell, SOCOM, Spy Fiction, Syphon Filter, Tony Hawk Underground, Xenosaga, and Zelda: The Wind Waker. Clearly, this was an idea whose time had come. Though Metal Gear Solid wasn't entirely without antecedents, in the wake of its massive success, an entire genre sprung up around the concept of avoiding enemies instead of overcoming them. Even games with an entirely different focus took to including short -- and usually poorly-conceived -- stealth segments, as a quick way of diversifying their gameplay. However, when focusing on what made Metal Gear Solid so special, it's important to keep in mind not just what was emulated, but also the parts that nobody seems interested or able to reproduce -- the parts that make it unmistakably a Hideo Kojima game. Getting Into Position Though Metal Gear Solid was the spark that lit the stealth fuse, it wasn't the first game to center around sneaking up on your enemy -- it wasn't even the first in the Metal Gear series, for that matter, being preceded by a pair of games for the Japan-only MSX. Metal Gear originally came out in 1987, followed by Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake in 1990. The NES port of the game came to America in 1988, and found a place as one of the enduring titles in that system's library. (Its America-only sequel, Snake's Revenge, received rather less lasting acclaim.) Metal Gear set into place many of the pieces later reused in the PlayStation game. To begin with, it introduced Solid Snake, who's to this day the main character in the series. Beyond that, it laid out the basic format for the series: Snake begins the game with nothing more than his fists and a pack of cigarettes, and must infiltrate a heavily guarded fortress, gaining equipment and armaments as he goes. Even in the MSX/NES days, there were specifically familiar elements: the electrified floor that had to be neutralized with remote-guided missiles, your support team who could be contacted only by radio transceiver, and a twisty story ending in a confrontation with the "nuclear-equipped, walking death-mobile" known as Metal Gear all cropped up again in Metal Gear Solid. Outside of the Metal Gear series proper, there had been other stabs at the same sort of general concept. The earliest of these was The Sentinel, developed in the UK in 1986: your goal was to prevent the titular Sentinel from seeing you from its perch at the top of a hill, The purest essence of Metal Gear Solid: just a guard, a wall, and you. as it constantly rotated his view around. By making careful use of cover as you ascended the hill, you could eventually come up from behind to overthrow the Sentinel and take its place. Between then and Metal Gear Solid, there wasn't much in the way of a direct progression, but one notable title was Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, which came out the same year as MGS and might in some alternate world have achieved the same popularity. Like MGS, it was a PlayStation game with completely 3D environments, and your goal was to evade detection as you negotiated large environments to complete your mission. It had a few things going for it that MGS didn't, such as a variety of ways each level might be populated so as to keep players on their toes -- but it also had a number of flaws, and since there tended to be a "right" way to approach each scenario that discouraged players from finding their own paths, it didn't catch on with the mainstream to the degree that Metal Gear Solid did. So why did MGS do well? What made it such a hit? One reason was that, underneath the sophisticated (for the time) graphical engine and storyline, the stealth gameplay was easy to understand and versatile enough to allow for some wiggle room. The key was the radar screen in the upper right: where Tenchu had given you only a "visibility meter" to determine how close an enemy was to seeing you, MGS let you see exactly where Snake was in relation to the enemies and their fields of vision. This allowed players to adjust their hiding places quickly and effectively if the enemy got too close, instead of wasting valuable seconds figuring out which direction the threat was coming from. Some slammed this mechanic for making it too easy to focus solely on the radar, but they glossed over a couple of important points: first, if you did happen to get spotted, the radar disappeared precisely when the enemy presence ramped up, making the next couple minutes frantic ones as you tried to find a good escape route and hiding place without knowing where the enemy was. (It's also possible to play the entire game without a radar, by choosing Hard difficulty.) Second, the game is more than a collection of stealth sequences; other tasks and activities, such as boss battles and one-off rappelling and combat challenges, take up as much time as sneaking around the base's corridors. There's enough variety in the game to break up what could have been monotonous, and Kojima is always throwing in new wrinkles. By Any Means Necessary If you're unfamiliar with gaming, you might be asking "Kojima who?" The answer is Hideo Kojima, the director (in multiple senses of the word) of the Metal Gear series, and he's important because of the unique stamp he leaves on his games. It's an approach that defies simple classification, partly because no one else in the industry does it; you may as well call it Kojimaism. Kojimaism isn't precisely "metagaming," though that label is tempting and occasionally apt. However, though his style does involve heavy self-awareness of the game as a game, that's less the point of the exercise and more the means through which he works. A better way to put it would be that Kojimaism is about experimenting with the medium to produce effects and gimmicks which could only happen in a game -- as a creator, Kojima has more in common with William Castle than Jerry Bruckheimer. If this is all a bit abstract, then maybe it's best to explain Kojimaism by examples. The earliest one in Metal Gear Solid comes when Snake meets the DARPA chief in the prison level of the first building. Mantis' amazing psychokinetic powers did seem pretty amazing at the time, especially when he knew you liked Castlevania. At the end of their conversation, the chief starts to get dizzy, which gives way to a fatal heart attack before Snake's eyes. The Kojima touch comes in by transmitting the cutscene not just through sight and sound, but also through touch: the vibration of the Dual Shock controller in the player's hands simulates a heartbeat that grows faster and faster until it goes out of control, gives a couple of weak pulses, and then stops. Kojimaism extends to other games he's directed, such as the solar sensor mechanic in Boktai for GBA, but the ne plus ultra of the style is the fight with Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid. Kojima uses every trick he can think of here; before the fight, Mantis "reads your soul" by making character judgements according to your accumulated game statistics so far, and makes note of any other Konami-published games that happen to have save files on your memory card. After more vibration-related trickery when Mantis moves your controller "through the power of my will alone," the fight begins in earnest. About five seconds in, the screen will go black and a green pixilated HIDEO appears in the upper right corner, meant to fool you into thinking the TV channel has changed. When the game comes back up, the player finds that Mantis is impervious to gunshots, and only after some experimentation (or some radio messages from your superiors) does the player discover that Mantis can be fooled by unplugging the controller and putting it into the other slot. As much of a reputation as Kojima's gotten for being high-minded and pretentious (mostly by people permanently scarred by the overlong, pseudoscience-filled monologues he tends to favor) sequences like this show that he also has a relentlessly playful side, and immensely enjoys a good joke on the player -- as everyone expecting a straight sequel to Metal Gear Solid discovered when they got a couple hours into MGS2. The Tip Of The Iceberg The best thing, ultimately, about Metal Gear Solid is the way that both important aspects of the game -- the birth of the stealth genre and the avalanche of Kojimaisms -- signified that even in 1998, there was still endless potential for experimentation and new ideas in games. Kojima himself continues to try wildly different things even unto the release of the new Metal Gear Solid 3, which has boss battles every bit as creative and unconventional as the ones from his first PSone game. And as for the industry at large, it continues to surprise us with innovations like GTA's "playground" gameplay style, proving that you never know when the next big thing might be around the corner, unseen and just waiting to ambush us. Metal Gear Solid Platform: PSOne/PC Date: 1998 Developer: KCEJ Publisher: Konami Landmarks: Invented and popularized the stealth game genre. Relentless use of gimmicks and 4th-wall breaking. Perfected a Hollywood-like approach to in-game storytelling. Progeny: Splinter Cell Boktai Beyond Good & Evil Spy Fiction Sly Cooper Resources: Metal Gear Online A fansite that covers the whole chronology of the series, with lots of resources and information. McFarlane Toys' Metal Gear Solid Photos of the super-detailed action figure line based on the game. Metal Gear Name Generator A way to feel just like you're a member of the strangest elite unit in history. Metal Gear REX Lego A reenactment of Metal Gear Solids climactic battle, done in Lego. Musings: "This is, no fooling, my favorite video game ever. Or it was at one point, anyway -- when I was in school and had nothing better to do for a few hours, in would go Metal Gear Solid for another playthrough. I think I've completed the game over 20 times by now, and there was a point when I could recite all the dialogue along with the game's characters. "Though I can't do that anymore (and a good thing too) booting it up again for this writeup showed me that, to my surprise, it hasn't aged badly at all. Even after MGS2 and 3 evolved the series' play control and presentation, the first game holds its own, and there's nothing quite like it -- even attempts at a remake on the GameCube fell flat and, like New Coke, can't compare to the original. "The shock of how new and flat-out crazy the game was impressed me so much at the time that it's probably what led me to start writing about games. For the first time, I felt like this was a game you could write about and not sound like too much of an idiot, because there was so much there to take on. I did the rabid fanboy thing and produced an analysis of Just Who Ocelot Really Was -- now proven incorrect, though I still like my theory -- and later did the academic thing for a look at how the game approached choice-making. "Things got a little weird in the second game, with some frankly indefensible scenes, but I'll step up and extol its virtues (for it does have them in spades) any day. And the third game, which needs no defending, is a great step back to everything that made people love MGS in the first place. I might not be able to get that much into Kojima's other games -- ZOE2 is fun but minor, and Boktai gives me sunburns -- but no matter the time or the place, I'll always be playing Metal Gear and over-analyzing the experience afterward." Article by Nich Maragos << Ocarina of Time | The Essential 50 | Half-Life >>