This has the potential to be one of my shortest write ups yet, as the case for “Metal Gear Solid” is an absurdly strong one.
Put simply, this game popularized an entire video game genre, “the stealth game,” doing the concept better than it had ever been done before, while also making it a viable format for others to emulate.
So, what you have here ultimately is a quality game which is also an important and influential game.
There you go, case made.
(Naturally, what makes the game “quality” is subject to interpretation, which is why we bother with this whole series in the first place.)
Metal Gear Solid at a glance:
Genre: Stealth game
Released: 1998
Platform: PlayStation
IGN’s Best PlayStation Game Ever
Confession time: I didn’t play Metal Gear Solid for the first time until a couple of months ago.
I knew all about it at release, watched a college buddy play it at one point around 1999 or so, pondered trying to buy it discounted or second-hand for a very, very, VERY long time, debated with myself whether the much flawed “Playstation Classic” would be worth a purchase solely for the opportunity to play the included Metal Gear Solid before eventually deferring … and then sort of waffled on purchasing the somewhat newly released “Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection” for another year or so before finally pulling the trigger last fall.
It was always one of those “you’ve gotta play it” games that never seemed to be convenient enough to be able to actually play the thing. Yeah, it was out there, but was it worth the cost (let alone the time investment)?
The “Master Collection” – which includes the first three “Solid” games plus the older NES games and a bunch of promotional material – is a decent enough set, but it wasn’t available in a proper physical format on Switch, which due to storage concerns necessitated a purchase on Steam. The problem with that is the Steam version never really went on discount very much.
Again, was it worth the cost?
Hence the waffling.
I think what finally sealed the deal for me was just a sense of my own mortality. I did, after all, want to play it before I freakin’ died.
In short, Metal Gear Solid was bucket-list worthy.
So, I finally overcame my thrifty nature, spoiled myself with the Steam version, and off I went into the world of people screaming “Snake!” at me over and over while I crouched around military complexes in a cardboard box, super stealthy like.
Of course, the basic definition of what constitutes a “stealth” game is pretty straightforward: your character has to sneak around to survive. Enemy avoidance is critical to your chances of success.
Just how much sneaking is required can vary from game to game, and we organically have gone from more rudimentary attempts in the 1980s arcade era to the highly polished Triple-A titles of today, but that’s the basic throughline: that you have to be sneaky.
Metal Gear Solid was a sequel to one of the earliest pioneers of the genre, the original “Metal Gear” on the NES. That game was a pretty typical 8-bit affair in many respects, featuring a top-down perspective and your little pixelated guy roaming around a bunch of military-looking locales, putting bullets in people’s chests. What made it a stealth game was that early on in the experience you had no weaponry to speak of, so yeah, by necessity, for a while you had to sneak around to acquire the means to merc your enemies. But eventually, it basically drops all that pretense and you’re captain badass shooting everything that moves like Rambo.
I think those opening moments of the game being so different is what really resonated with people and gave them affinity for the brand. Hideo Kojima, the project lead, has said in interviews that the NES game, which was actually a port, was compromised in many respects, and the man has a point. The game is at best a flawed concept of a plan.
Anyhow, the game was a commercial success despite its concessions, and it subsequently gained the occasional sequel. Kojima, who had also led the development of a graphic adventure game “Snatcher” which was widely credited with popularizing a more cinematic approach to game making, was brought back for the sequels, until eventually, mercifully, he was given the keys to a machine more suited to his creative ambition in the PlayStation.
Beyond the obvious visual and audio enhancements it provided, how Metal Gear Solid broke free of its predecessors’ shackles was primarily in its capacity for telling a longer, more involved story, through the use of cut scenes and the like. This was not especially innovative on the face of it (cut scenes had been around a long time, after all), but what it did do was push boundaries.
Few other games had attempted to tell such an ambitious narrative, because few games had been willing to take active control away from their players to such a large degree. Gamers in Metal Gear Solid would be expected to play the game and be active participants, but then stop and enjoy the story for several minutes before being allowed to continue to the next area/hurdle/challenge/fight.
Building into those storytelling aspects, Snake is equipped with a radio that connects him with a bunch of people who are meant to assist him, but also just repeat his name a lot.
“Snake. Snake? SNAKE!”
These conversations can be initiated at basically any time, and they adapt to whatever scenario you’re currently involved in. The downside? They grind the game to a halt, similar to the cinematics. But it’s another method of fleshing out the world and characters so that the story feels more cinematic in nature. Again, not ground-breaking, but taken to an extreme not generally seen before. There are a lot of people here to interact with, and they offer a fair bit of color (and even the occasional bit of help).
In a similar way, the game pushes you to embrace stealth and utilize it to a much larger degree than other games had before. Yeah, you get into cardboard boxes at varying points and sneak around that way, and that’s really sort of hilarious in a Bugs Bunny sort of way. You kind of expect Acme to show up with some impossible gadget partway through the game (maybe that’s where the “Metal Gear,” the doomsday machine that appears in the title originally came from). But the silliness ultimately doesn’t distract too much – and is paired with an equally absurd plot and some ridiculous, over-the-top characterization, making it seem appropriate. Beyond the cardboard boxes though, you hide behind corners, crawl through air ducts, sneak up behind enemies to choke them out quietly, and basically use all manner of methods to keep the guards from sounding the alarm, an act which puts the game into high-speed death mode, wherein enemies just keep coming at you relentlessly and you have to be quite good (and a little lucky) just to survive.
I recall a selling point for the game at the time was its realism, and I’m not sure how much of that was pushed by Konami and how much was just random fans selling that narrative, but it is of course hilariously wrong with the benefit of some hindsight.
The cardboard boxes alone should be enough to tell you that.
I think the point people at the time were trying to get at is that in practice a guy running around with a machine gun blowing everything up indiscriminately is apt to get cut down really quickly, and in that sense, yeah the stealth here is a more realistic take on things than the jacked dudes in Contra throwing endless lives and ammunition at their problems.
So yes, this approach was different, and very much welcome.
Another hallmark of the series is that the game breaks the fourth wall in a lot of really interesting ways. The most famous of these is the boss encounter with Psycho Mantis, who will taunt the player with all sorts of information gleaned via your save data on the memory card and who cannot be defeated without changing which controller port you happen to have your controller plugged into (this is his way of demonstrating to you that you’ve become too predictable and too easy to defeat; the port change “prevents” him from anticipating all of your moves).
It doesn’t end with one fight, though. There’s a code on the cover of the box you must use to advance in the game at one point (you are directed to it by in-game dialogue), and several characters throughout the game will urge you to not only take character-specific actions (like “sneak into that place”), but also player-specific actions (like “you should save the game”).
My favorite meta-reference of all, however, might be the torture sequence, which requires the player to push a button as fast as they possibly can, reminiscent of those old NES track and field games.
For anyone who has already experienced this form of gaming, that sort of requirement on the gamer is indeed torture, as pushing the buttons quickly enough and forcefully enough is typically a weird sort of dance, as one’s inputs don’t always register as intended, so you must push fast AND hard, making one’s fingers and thumbs literally hurt in the process.
It frankly makes a perfect pairing here, where your character, Solid Snake, is being tortured himself.
Yes, I typically hate this sort of requirement being placed on the gamer. But the dread here at having to go through subsequent rounds of torture is palpable. It’s really a brilliant flip of an annoying game mechanic into something that connects you with the story better.
The game eventually ends in a big crazy series of bombastic boss fights and explosive set pieces interspersed with all the melodrama that might feel more at home in a soap opera, but hey, go big or go home, I say. That the plot gets overly dramatic (and kind of silly) really just fits the over-the-top action and the previously established tone of the game.
We’re in a wacky place, not resembling real life, but that’s okay.
We’re here to be entertained, and ultimately, Snake entertains us in a really big way.
So what makes it worth playing today?
There’s an element of risk at play in choosing to include this game here in the countdown, at No. 41, and that’s because I’ve still yet to play its sequels, specifically “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty” and “Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater,” two games which would also be eligible for this list (having been released more than 20 years ago).
What if either of those games provides more enjoyment than this one?
Ultimately, I circled back to my rationale with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and its inclusion over any of its well-regarded sequels: The original captured a time and place in a really significant manner. It was a big deal within the Zeitgeist, so to speak. And while the sequels may be proven to be better games by objective reasoning, they will not be more important, by themselves, to the history of gaming.
The original Metal Gear Solid mattered.
A lot.
To wit, if the average person on the street were to make their own “Mt. Rushmore” of best/most important PlayStation games, most people would include this sucker in their Top 4.*
* I have it JUST outside my Top 4, behind “Chrono Cross,” “Final Fantasy VII,” “Castlevania: Symphony of the Night,” and the aforementioned “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.”
So yeah, I’m comfortable with this decision. MGS, due to historical importance but also on its own merits as a fun game, deserves to be here.
Will its sequels join the party at some point? That remains to be seen. But the simple fact that the sequels even exist at all is a credit to what Metal Gear Solid achieved.
It made stealth games more ambitious, it made them more entertaining, and it made them viable.
That it did it with its own wacky style is just the cherry on top.
SNAKE!!!!
Dave’s Score: 9/10
Check out the whole Retro Gaming Essentials list here!
How to play
- Original hardware (PlayStation)
- Windows/PC
- “Twin Snakes” remake (GameCube)
- PlayStation Store (PS3 and PSP)
- PlayStation Classic
- Metal Gear Solid Master Collection (Switch, Steam, PS4, PS5, Xbox X/S)