Metal Gear Solid (video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Metal Gear Solid arrived on the PlayStation on the 3rd of September 1998, carrying a premise that felt like a thriller novel: a retired soldier named Solid Snake is pulled back into service to infiltrate a nuclear weapons facility in Alaska, held by a rogue unit of genetically enhanced super-soldiers. The man behind the game was Hideo Kojima, who directed, produced, and wrote it. What he made would go on to sell more than seven million copies worldwide despite the fact that neither he nor anyone on his team expected it to sell at all. Kojima himself admitted in a 2014 interview that he "didn't think at all of how to make this game sell well, because I didn't expect it to sell." The questions that follow are the ones that make this story worth telling: how did a team of twenty people, working on a budget partly funded by Lego building blocks and trips to a gun rental shop, produce something critics called "the best game ever made"? And what made a game about hiding in cardboard boxes the founding document of an entire genre?

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• 2. Building the World

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  Development began in 1995, though it had already been gestating a year earlier. Kojima first conceived of the project while working on Policenauts, a 1994 adventure game, and conceptual artwork by artist Yoji Shinkawa featuring Solid Snake and Meryl Silverburgh appeared in the Policenauts Pilot Disk before the full 3DO version shipped in 1995. The project was briefly halted by the Great Hanshin earthquake, which caused major damage to the development studio, before it was moved to the PlayStation platform.

  Kojima wanted the player to believe the world was real. His stated standard was precise: "if the player isn't tricked into believing that the world is real, then there's no point in making the game." To reach that standard, he sent the team to the Huntington Beach SWAT team for a live demonstration of vehicles, weapons, and explosives. Weapons expert Motosada Mori served as technical adviser, and research trips included visits to Fort Irwin and firing sessions at Stembridge Gun Rentals. Individual desks were designed separately. Props were not just sketched; Shinkawa built plastic models at home first, then drew final designs from those models.

  Solid Snake himself was redesigned from scratch. Konami felt the middle-aged appearance from earlier games had weak commercial appeal. Shinkawa based Snake's physique for this installment on Jean-Claude Van Damme and his face on Christopher Walken. The team opted not to use motion capture because they wanted the action to feel stylized and movie-like, so an animator with anime experience designed the animations by hand.

  For spatial planning, Kojima used Lego building blocks and toy figurines to mock up three-dimensional areas and check camera angles before anything was built in code. At its peak, the team numbered twenty people. For much of the early development period there was a single programmer working on the game's code, and the team did not reach full strength until September 1996.

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• 3. The Game Underneath

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  Snake moves through Shadow Moses from an overhead perspective that echoes the original 2D Metal Gear games on the MSX2, but the camera shifts in specific circumstances: it swings to a corner view when Snake flattens himself against a wall, and drops to first-person when he crawls under tight spaces or equips items like binoculars or a sniper rifle. The choice to keep the overhead angle was deliberate. The team considered first-person games difficult to control and wanted a 2D feel while still placing the action in a genuine 3D world.

  At the center of the stealth system sits the on-screen radar. When Snake steps into an enemy's field of vision, an "alert mode" fires, drawing enemies toward him. He must hide until "evasion mode" begins; once its counter reaches zero, the game returns to "infiltration mode" and enemies stop searching. The radar itself goes dark during alert and evasion modes, removing the tool players rely on most at precisely the moments they need it most. Techniques available to stay hidden include crawling under objects, using a cardboard box as cover, ducking around walls, and making deliberate noise to draw enemies away.

  The Codec radio device serves as the game's connective tissue. Snake's support team delivers advice, explains combat moves in terms of which buttons to press, and can chide Snake for not saving often enough. The Codec also delivers the game's backstory in long radio exchanges. A separate VR training mode divides into three categories: practice, time attack, and gun shooting, each with ten stages. Completing all thirty stages unlocks a survival mission in which Snake must clear ten consecutive stages within a seven-minute limit.

  The title itself came from a naming decision Kojima made deliberately. He chose "Metal Gear Solid" rather than "Metal Gear 3" because the earlier MSX2 games were not widely known outside Japan. The word "Solid" referenced not only the protagonist's codename but the transition from 2D to 3D computer graphics.

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• 4. Shadow Moses and Its Inhabitants

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  Shadow Moses is a nuclear weapons disposal facility on a remote island in Alaska's Fox Archipelago. In the year 2005, the renegade unit FOXHOUND seizes it and threatens a nuclear strike unless the US government delivers the remains of Big Boss and one billion dollars within twenty-four hours. The mecha at the center of the standoff is Metal Gear REX, a machine capable of launching a nuclear warhead anywhere in the world.

  FOXHOUND is stocked with specialists. Revolver Ocelot is a Western-style gunslinger whose weapon of choice is the Colt Single Action Army and who also serves as an expert interrogator. Sniper Wolf is described as a preternatural sniper. Vulcan Raven carries an M61 Vulcan cannon torn from a downed F-16 and is identified as a hulking Alaskan shaman. Psycho Mantis is a psychic profiler and psychokinesis expert. Decoy Octopus is a master of disguise. Their leader is Liquid Snake, who is Solid Snake's genetic counterpart and, as the story reveals, his twin brother, both cloned from Big Boss through a 1970s government program called Les Enfants Terribles.

  Snake's support network operates entirely over Codec. Colonel Roy Campbell, his former commanding officer, provides information and tactics while gradually revealing secrets he initially withholds. Naomi Hunter handles medical advice. Nastasha Romanenko covers item and weapon tips. Mei Ling, who invented the Soliton radar system used during the mission, also manages mission data and is the one the player calls to save the game. Otacon, the civilian designer of Metal Gear REX, joins Snake's side mid-mission after the cyborg ninja Gray Fox forces the confrontation that reveals REX's true purpose.

  The game's deepest reveal comes late: the FOXDIE virus, injected into Snake without his knowledge by Naomi Hunter, causes cardiac arrest in FOXHOUND members on contact. It is the actual weapon the US government sent Snake to deploy, allowing them to recover REX undamaged. Snake emerges alive but with an indeterminate amount of time before the virus turns on him.

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• 5. Voice, Music, and Presentation

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  David Hayter voiced Solid Snake in English; Doug Stone voiced Psycho Mantis. Every other member of the English cast was credited under pseudonyms. The reason given was that Screen Actors Guild rules at the time were unclear about video game performances. When those actors returned for the 2004 GameCube remake Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, they were credited under their real names.

  Jeremy Blaustein, who had previously localized Snatcher for the Sega CD, wrote the English script. One significant change he made was expanding Mei Ling's pool of motivational quotes to include Western sources and authors; the original Japanese version had her citing only Chinese proverbs. A Kojima cameo, in which he thanked the player via voiceover, was cut from Western releases because it required save data from Snatcher and Policenauts on the player's memory card, and neither title had been released outside Japan.

  The musical score was composed by Konami's in-house team: Kazuki Muraoka, Hiroyuki Togo, Takanari Ishiyama, Lee Jeon Myung, and Maki Kirioka. The main theme came from Tappi Iwase of the Konami Kukeiha Club. For the ending credits, composer and lyricist Rika Muranaka contributed a song called "The Best is Yet To Come," performed in Irish by Aoife Ni Fhearraigh. The soundtrack was released on the 23rd of September 1998 under the King Records label.

  Cinematic cutscenes were rendered using the game's own in-engine graphics rather than pre-rendered video. The Japanese release came with an extensive promotional campaign that included television and magazine advertisements, in-store samples, and demo giveaways, totaling eight million dollars in promotional costs. A limited Premium Package sold in Japan contained a t-shirt, FOXHOUND-themed dog tags, memory card stickers, an audio CD of MSX2 Metal Gear soundtracks, and a forty-page booklet titled Metal Gear Solid Classified.

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• 6. Reception and Commercial Life

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  Before the game shipped, its demonstrations at trade shows between 1996 and 1998 had already built significant international interest. The 1996 Tokyo Game Show was the first public reveal; E3 1997 followed with a short video that generated what Kojima later described as an enthusiastic response that took him by surprise and raised his expectations for the American market. The 1998 version was playable for the first time at the Tokyo Game Show that year.

  On release, the game earned what review aggregator Metacritic classified as "universal acclaim." PlayStation Official Magazine UK called it "the best game ever made. Unputdownable and unforgettable." IGN wrote that it came "closer to perfection than any other game in PlayStation's action genre" and described it as "beautiful, engrossing, and innovative...in every conceivable category." Arcade magazine praised it for "introducing a brand new genre: the sneak-'em-up." Next Generation gave it five stars out of five. Metal Gear Solid received an Excellence Award for Interactive Art at the 1998 Japan Media Arts Festival and was nominated at the 2nd Annual Interactive Achievement Awards in six categories including "Game of the Year."

  Commercially, the results confounded Kojima's own expectations. In 1998 alone, PC Data reported 1.06 million copies sold in the United States, making it the country's fifth-best-selling PlayStation title and the third highest-grossing that year. It topped sales charts in the United Kingdom and Japan and led first-month console game sales in the US. In Germany, the Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland awarded it a Platinum rating in June 1999 for surpassing 200,000 copies. In Europe, the game grossed over 40 million euros in 1999. By early 2001, worldwide sales had reached six million units. The combined total of the original and Integral exceeded 6.78 million by 2004, and ultimately surpassed seven million.

  In 1999, Next Generation placed it 27th on their "Top 50 Games of All Time," calling it "one of the most vibrant efforts in gaming history to bring serious ideas to games." In 2010, PC Magazine ranked it seventh among the most influential video games of all time, citing its effect on later stealth titles including Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell. The Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition 2008 awarded it a record for the "Most Innovative Use of a Video Game Controller" for the Psycho Mantis boss fight, a sequence that required players to plug their controller into the second port to prevent Mantis from reading their inputs.

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• 7. Expansions and Adaptations

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  Metal Gear Solid: Integral, released in Japan on the 25th of June 1999 for the PlayStation, expanded the base game substantially. Its most notable addition was a VR Disc containing 300 training missions divided into four categories: Sneaking, Weapons, Advanced, and Special. The Special category included murder mysteries, giant genome soldiers, and flying saucers. One set of missions allowed players to control the Cyborg Ninja. Completing all 300 missions unlocked concept artwork of Metal Gear RAY, a mech that would appear in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Famitsu rated Integral 34 out of 40.

  The VR Disc content was released separately in North America on the 23rd of September 1999 as Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions and in the PAL region on the 29th of October as Metal Gear Solid: Special Missions. The Windows version of Metal Gear Solid, published by Microsoft Games and developed by Digital Dialect, arrived in North America on the 22nd of September 2000 and in the United Kingdom on the 20th of October 2000. It supported resolutions up to 1024x768 and scored 83 on Metacritic, criticized for graphic glitches and the age of the port.

  The GameCube remake Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, developed by Silicon Knights under Konami supervision, released in March 2004. Its cutscenes were directed by Japanese film director Ryuhei Kitamura, who brought bullet time photography and choreographed gunplay to the material. In September 2004, IDW Publications launched a bimonthly comic series written by Kris Oprisko and illustrated by Ashley Wood, running 12 issues through 2006 and later adapted into a PlayStation Portable interactive release. A novelization by Raymond Benson was published by Del Rey, with the American paperback edition dated the 27th of May 2008. A second novelization, Metal Gear Solid Substance I, was published in Japan by Kadokawa Shoten on the 25th of August 2015 under the pen name Hitori Nojima.

  The October 2023 re-release as part of Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 made the game available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and Windows via Steam. That version runs on an emulator developed by M2 and allows players to choose from seven regional versions of the game, including the Japanese, North American, and four European language editions.

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