Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake

• 1. Introduction

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  Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake sat at the No. 1 spot on MSX Magazine's chart of Japan's 30 best-selling MSX games in October 1990. The game held that ranking for six months after release. Konami released this MSX2 title in 1990, positioning it as the second mainline entry in the Metal Gear series and the sixth installment chronologically. It served as a direct sequel to the original Metal Gear from 1987. Series creator Hideo Kojima wrote and designed the game himself. The story weaves together the machinery of warfare and the politics of nuclear proliferation.

  What drove Kojima to build a second Metal Gear game so quickly? Why does its story carry so much more weight than the original's? How did the guards, the radar, and the player's own tools change between the two games? And how did a game that stayed a Japanese exclusive for sixteen years end up shaping the celebrated 3D sequel that followed it?

• 2. An Empire Built on Oil and Betrayal

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  Metal Gear 2 is set in a near future where the Cold War never really ended, dragging on into the 1990s. A worldwide oil crisis drives the plot, with petrol reserves in the late 1990s running out faster than experts had predicted. Alternative fuels and new drilling both fail to close the gap. Czech scientist Dr. Kio Marv answers the shortage by bio-engineering OILIX, an algae that produces petroleum-grade hydrocarbons cheaply and with little effort. He unveils it at the World Energy Conference in Prague, then sets off toward a demonstration in the United States. Soldiers from Zanzibar Land kidnap him before he arrives. Zanzibar Land is a Central Asian nation founded in 1997, after its people won a war of independence from the Soviet Union. NATO uncovers the country's real plan. Zanzibar Land intends to control the global oil supply through OILIX. At the same time, it arms itself with nuclear warheads pulled from stockpiles that were marked for dismantling under global disarmament efforts.

  FOXHOUND's new commanding officer, Roy Campbell, pulls Solid Snake out of retirement. He sends Snake into Zanzibar Land on Christmas Eve of 1999 to bring Dr. Marv home. Snake does not go in alone. Holly White, a CIA operative posing as a journalist, and Gustava Heffner, an StB agent assigned as Marv's bodyguard, both join him on the ground. He also finds Dr. Drago Pettrovich Madnar, the same scientist who designed the original Metal Gear back at Outer Heaven. Madnar claims Zanzibar Land forced him back to work, this time building a new machine called Metal Gear D. He is also made to oversee production of smaller Metal Gear units that carry no nuclear payload. Snake soon learns something Campbell never told him. Big Boss, his former commanding officer and an enemy Snake already beat once, survived that defeat and now rules Zanzibar Land himself.

  Heffner does not survive the mission. A missile fired from Metal Gear D kills her as she, Snake, and Madnar approach the country's main prison. Madnar is dragged back into captivity. Inside Marv's cell, Snake finds only a corpse and the OILIX research data. Holly later tells him that Marv actually died under Madnar's own torture. Madnar, it turns out, volunteered himself to Zanzibar Land, seeking revenge on a scientific community that had shunned him since the Outer Heaven incident. When he lunges at Snake, Snake puts him down instead. The pilot inside Metal Gear D turns out to be Gray Fox, missing since Outer Heaven fell. Snake destroys the machine, then beats Gray Fox again in a hand-to-hand fight across an active minefield.

  Cornered afterward by Big Boss with no weapons left, Snake grabs the only tools within reach: a cigarette lighter and an aerosol can. He turns them into a makeshift flamethrower and beats his old commander a second time. Snake and Holly escape together and deliver the OILIX formula to Campbell. The game places these events in 1999, four years after the original Metal Gear. Metal Gear Solid would later revisit that same timeframe in its own telling of the story.

• 3. The Guards Get Smarter

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  In the original Metal Gear, a guard stayed locked to a single screen. In its sequel, that same soldier can walk clean across the map, tracking Snake from room to room. Guards also see wider now, sweeping a 45-degree field of vision instead of a straight line, and they can turn their heads to look diagonally. Their ears work too. A punch against a wall, a gunshot fired without a suppressor, even footsteps on certain surfaces, any of it can send a guard to investigate. Once spotted, a countdown appears in the screen's upper right corner, ticking down until the enemy loses track of Snake and the alert phase ends.

  Snake gains the ability to kneel and crawl, on top of walking. That lets him cross noisy terrain quietly, or squeeze into tight spaces such as under a desk or inside an air duct. Crawling also lets him pick up land mines by hand. A three-by-three radar grid in the upper right shows Snake as a red dot at the center, with enemy soldiers appearing as white dots nearby. The radar shuts off once an alert phase begins. Paired with a mine detector, that same radar can locate enemy mines or lock a Stinger missile onto a target in the air. New equipment includes robotic mice that lure guards away and a camouflage mat for hiding in the open. Three distinct types of ration are also added, each carrying its own special property. Both Snake's health and how much he can carry go up every time he defeats one of the game's bosses.

  The transceiver changes too. Conversations are now context-sensitive instead of simply tied to area, and the screen shows the faces of both Snake and whoever he is reaching. Snake can also radio or approach children living inside the fortress to pick up information, though killing one costs him health as a penalty. Some of the game's puzzles ask for patience rather than force. Snake might lure a carrier pigeon with one specific type of ration, or chase a female spy into the ladies' lavatory. Elsewhere, he has to work out secret tap codes to unlock new radio frequencies.

  Six enhanced soldiers stand between Snake and Zanzibar Land's leadership. Black Color is an experimental soldier from a disbanded NASA project, later revealed to be Kyle Schneider from the original Metal Gear. Running Man is a former Olympic runner turned terrorist. Red Blaster is an explosives expert out of Spetsnaz. Ultra Box specializes in ambushes inside confined spaces. Predator brings jungle-warfare training from the South African Reconnaissance Command. Night Sight, an assassin trained in Vietnam, wears a stealth suit advanced enough to hide him from radar and the naked eye alike.

  Saving progress on the MSX2 requires either a floppy disk drive or a Game Master II utility cartridge. Without either one, a player can instead write down a password to reload later. Later re-releases would drop that password system entirely, once memory cards and internal hard drives made it unnecessary.

• 4. A Race Against Snake's Revenge

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  Hideo Kojima directed the first MSX2 Metal Gear but had no hand in either of the two Nintendo Entertainment System sequels that followed it. That changed on a train ride in Tokyo. Kojima ran into a junior coworker who had been assigned to Snake's Revenge, the NES sequel Konami was building separately for North America and Europe. The coworker's account of that project pushed Kojima to build a sequel of his own. By the time the train reached its stop, he had already worked out the game's basic premise.

  A business trip to Konami's sales division gave Kojima his chance to make the pitch. His superiors were hesitant, since the Famicom conversion of the original Metal Gear had sold poorly in Japan. Kojima convinced them anyway, and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake got the green light.

  To get the details right, Kojima and his team consulted outside references, including a former Green Beret who had become an author. They also ran their own survival exercises in a forest near a mountain close to their workplace.

  The game was first announced for a February to March 1990 release window. It slipped to July instead, and its ROM size grew from 3-Megabit to 4-Megabit during development. Work also paused for a stretch so Kojima's team could help a separate group finish SD Snatcher, which was in development at the same time.

  Kojima originally wanted to call the game simply Solid Snake. The idea borrowed from the Indiana Jones film series, which named its sequels after the lead character. Konami's sales and marketing department insisted on adding Metal Gear 2 as a fore-title instead.

  The original MSX2 release even borrowed faces from Hollywood for its character portraits. Solid Snake's likeness was modeled on Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. Big Boss was modeled on Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October, and Grey Fox on Tom Berenger in Platoon. Roy Campbell's portrait drew on Richard Crenna in Rambo, and Holly White's on Brenda Bakke in the film Gunhed. The cartridge itself carried more than character art; a custom sound chip inside it was about to change how the game sounded too.

• 5. Music from a Custom Chip

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  Seven members of Konami's in-house Kukeiha Club wrote the score: Tsuyoshi Sekito, Masahiro Ikariko, Mutsuhiko Izumi, Yuko Kurahashi, Tomoya Tomita, Kazuhiko Uehara, and Yuji Takenouchi. Their work ran through a custom sound chip built into the cartridge itself, called the SCC. Konami had already used that same chip in Nemesis 2 and in Snatcher. The SCC pushed the music and sound effects well beyond what the MSX's standard PSG chip could produce.

  Metal Gear Solid: Integral, released in North America as Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions, reused arranged Metal Gear 2 music for its VR training disc. Integral also hides two more Metal Gear 2 tunes inside the main game. Contacting CODEC frequency 140.66 in certain locations plays an arrangement of the Theme of Solid Snake, or one of Zanzibar Breeze.

  The Theme of Solid Snake later crossed over into Nintendo's own roster, appearing in the 2008 fighting game Super Smash Bros. Brawl. A rearranged version returned a decade later in the 2018 sequel, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. By then, a piece of music written for a Japan-only MSX2 cartridge was reaching players who had never touched the original game at all.

• 6. A Long Road West

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  Konami released the MSX2 version of Metal Gear 2 in Japan on the 20th of July 1990. No official English localization followed, since Konami had already stopped selling its MSX games in Europe by that point. A fan translation eventually arrived in 1997, made by an MSX hobbyist group called G&T International. Unofficial imports of the Japanese cartridge had already reached Europe by 1996, with some fans there asking for a PlayStation port of their own.

  The first official port to another platform did not arrive until the 1st of October 2004. A Japanese feature phone version launched that day as a downloadable app on i-mode, EZweb, and Yahoo! Mobile. This version added an easy mode and an unlockable boss rush mode, available once a player cleared the main game. It also swapped out the original character portraits, which had been modeled on movie stars. In their place came new art closer to Metal Gear Solid illustrator Yoji Shinkawa's later character designs.

  Those same portrait changes carried over into Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, an expanded edition of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Subsistence was released in Japan in 2005 for the PlayStation 2. Subsistence included full ports of both the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 as new bonus content. Subsistence reached North America and Europe in 2006, carrying full English localizations of both MSX2 games. That gave Metal Gear 2 its first release outside Japan.

  Both MSX2 games later reappeared in the HD remastered version of Metal Gear Solid 3. That version came to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2011, and to the PlayStation Vita in 2012. On the 24th of October 2023, both games returned again as part of the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection series. The series launched on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X and S. Metal Gear 2 was offered as additional content with the standalone re-release of the original Metal Gear Solid. It also came bundled inside the larger Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1, alongside Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3.

  Metal Gear 2 also appeared on the Wii Virtual Console, exclusively in Japan, on the 30th of March 2010. Unlike the Subsistence and HD Edition ports, which derived from the mobile phone version, this release emulated the original MSX2 hardware directly. It was still patched to use the revised character portraits rather than the movie-inspired ones from 1990. By the time these re-releases had piled up, critics and players finally had an easy way to judge the original MSX2 game's reputation.

• 7. The Verdict, Then and Now

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  Paul Soth reviewed the game for GameSpy and concluded that Metal Gear 2 surpassed its predecessor, the original Metal Gear, in every way. He praised the game's 'gripping, well written storyline' for its 'rich characterization.' Soth wrote that the game carried the 'same quality of storytelling that made MGS so compelling.' He concluded that players would not be disappointed by 'the great gameplay and story,' calling it 'one of the best 8 bit games ever made.'

  Game Informer took a harder line, scoring the game 7 out of 10. Its review warned that reaching the story's most pivotal moments meant enduring 'some of the most ridiculous situations Solid Snake has ever seen.' The magazine also criticized the design for its 'constant backtracking and keycard acquisition,' calling that focus 'too repetitive.' It concluded that 'only diehard fans will find the experience rewarding.' The magazine recommended playing it through the bonus disc included with Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence.

  A direct sequel titled Metal Gear Solid reached the PlayStation in 1998. Despite the leap into 3D graphics, its mechanics stayed close to its 2D predecessor. The game even folded in plot summaries of both earlier MSX2 titles, accessible through a Special mode called 'Previous Operations.'

  Retro Gamer later called Metal Gear 2 'as close as anyone can get to playing Metal Gear Solid in 2D.' The magazine ranked it above a Game Boy Color game released a decade later, in 2000. Retro Gamer also placed Metal Gear 2 among its list of the top ten MSX games. Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com went further, describing Metal Gear Solid as 'basically a high-spec remake of Metal Gear 2.' His colleague Nickolai Adkins traced exactly how much of Metal Gear 2's plot resurfaced in Metal Gear Solid. At the start, Snake is again pulled out of retirement to rescue 'a kidnapped non-soldier personnel.' At the end, both games share an 'escape sequence where Snake is accompanied by his female accomplice/love interest.'

  IGN later pointed to this game as the origin of several stealth-genre staples that outlasted the MSX2 hardware it was built for.