Metal Gear (video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Metal Gear arrived on the MSX2 home computer on the 13th of July, 1987, and almost nobody outside Japan noticed at first. It was a game about hiding. In an era defined by games that rewarded shooting everything on screen, a young Konami developer named Hideo Kojima had built something almost perverse: a military action game where the goal was to avoid confrontation entirely. The player controlled a rookie operative named Solid Snake, tasked with slipping inside a fortified state called Outer Heaven and destroying a bipedal nuclear-armed mecha before it could threaten the entire world. What nobody expected was that this quiet, evasion-based game for a computer platform that never reached North America would eventually reshape how the entire medium thought about genre, storytelling, and design. The questions worth asking are not just what Metal Gear was, but how it came to be, why it worked, and how a version the creator publicly disowned ended up selling a million copies in the United States.

• 2. A Game About Hiding

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  Kojima did not set out to make a stealth game. Metal Gear was originally conceived as a straightforward military action game, the kind of thing that fit naturally alongside Konami's other output of that era. The MSX2 hardware had other ideas. Its processor struggled to display multiple on-screen bullets and enemies simultaneously, which made any conventional shooting experience feel broken. The platform also lacked the smooth scrolling capabilities needed to produce a fluid shooter in the style of Konami's own arcade hit Scramble from 1981. Faced with those constraints, Kojima made a pivot that would define the next three decades of a genre. He drew inspiration from the 1963 film The Great Escape and redirected the entire design around avoiding capture rather than defeating enemies. He described the new goal as "trying to form the tension of hide and seek." When Snake was spotted, the gameplay shifted into something Kojima compared to Pac-Man from 1980: the enemy guards chased the player the way Pac-Man's ghosts did, and escaping them became a spatial puzzle rather than a firefight. The game's limitations had forced an invention.

• 3. The Radio and the Story

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  Kojima introduced one more idea that would prove as influential as the stealth mechanics: a portable radio transceiver that Snake carried throughout the mission. At the time, video game storytelling was largely confined to text boxes and cutscenes with no connection to what the player was actually doing. Kojima's radio changed that relationship. In his own words, it allowed "you to send and receive comms" while the "game moves along with the player, so when the drama happens when the player" is not present, "the player's current situation can be depicted while the other characters' story or situation can be foreshadowed in parallel" simultaneously. Snake could contact his commanding officer Big Boss, or resistance members operating near Outer Heaven: Schneider, Diane, and Jennifer, each with their own specialty and their own frequency number the player had to track. The system made the fiction feel active rather than decorative. It also carried the game's most striking narrative twist: Big Boss, Snake's own commander, was orchestrating the mission to fail, feeding Snake bad advice and leading him into traps, before eventually breaking the fourth wall by telling the player to switch off the console. That moment of a game speaking directly to the person holding the controller was startling in 1987.

• 4. The NES Version Kojima Disowned

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  When Konami ported Metal Gear to the Famicom and then to the NES for North American release in June 1988, Kojima had no involvement. According to Kojima, the port was developed by a separate Konami division in Tokyo that received the MSX2 source code without the consent of the original team. Programmer Masahiro Ueno later stated that the porting staff were given a three-month deadline and were explicitly ordered to make the version as different from the original as possible. The differences were substantial. Hardware mapper limitations meant the Metal Gear mech itself had to be removed from the game entirely, replaced by a Supercomputer guarded by four soldiers. The underwater infiltration opening of the MSX2 version was replaced by Snake parachuting into a jungle alongside three other soldiers who disappear after the intro and are never mentioned again. The basement floors of two buildings were redesigned as separate structures, Buildings 4 and 5, reachable only through jungle mazes whose correct paths were never disclosed to the player. The NES version also notoriously contained a passcode with an expletive that, when entered with the remaining spaces filled with the number 1, transported the player directly to the final battle with no equipment. The European version had its vowels stripped from the passcode system as a result. Kojima publicly disowned the NES port years after its release, yet that version sold one million copies in the United States and ranked second on the U.S. sales charts in October 1988, sitting just below Super Mario Bros. 2.

• 5. Box Art, Biehn, and the Artist

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  The face that most players in the West associated with Metal Gear had nothing to do with Kojima's vision. The packaging illustration for retail releases was drawn by Akira Nishimura, a freelance artist whose work also appeared on Konami titles including Gradius, Castlevania, and the Japanese edition of Contra. Nishimura's image showed Solid Snake holding a gun alongside the Metal Gear weapon itself, a composition meant to convey the scale of the conflict. Snake's specific pose, however, came from somewhere else entirely: a publicity photograph of actor Michael Biehn in character as Kyle Reese from the 1984 film The Terminator. Kojima, who was still newly employed at Konami when the illustration was commissioned, had no involvement in its production. The early planning name for the game was simply Intruder, and the MSX2 Japanese release was written entirely in katakana, with character names in Roman letters, partly because of memory constraints. The English version used entirely uppercase text, contained misspellings and grammatical errors throughout, and featured only 56 percent of the radio calls present in the Japanese original.

• 6. The World It Built

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  Clint Hocking, the designer behind Splinter Cell and Far Cry 2, stated directly that every stealth-action game "owes its existence to the success of Metal Gear" and that "Without Metal Gear, there would be no stealth games." Cliff Bleszinski, who created Unreal and Gears of War, named the latter game as a deliberate homage to Metal Gear, citing the military themes and action gameplay as a major influence on his career. Takuma Endo, creator of Tenchu, also cited Metal Gear as a direct influence. The three themes from the MSX2 version, titled "Operation Intrude N313," "Theme of Tara," and "Just Another Dead Soldier," were reused in Metal Gear Solid for the PlayStation in 1998 and carried forward into Metal Gear: Ghost Babel and Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance. "Theme of Tara" appeared in the "Shadow Moses Island" stage of Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii and could be selected via iPod item in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. The reaction to Snake's disownment was also creative: Kojima built Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake as his direct response to Snake's Revenge, the NES sequel produced without him, releasing both in Japan in 1990 on the MSX2. That cycle of sequels, responses, and reinventions eventually produced Metal Gear Solid for the PlayStation, and from there a franchise that continued for decades. A gamebook adaptation published by Konami in Japan in 1988 depicted Solid Snake as an unsuccessful illustrator in civilian life, a quietly humanizing detail that the games themselves never explored.