Metal Gear Solid

• Release Date: 1998
• Platform: PC, PS1
• Developer: Konami
• Genre: Stealth

When designer Hideo Kojima brought his Metal Gear series to PlayStation, he did more than just kick-start the most popular stealth franchise in gaming history. He began a conversation that continues today, sharing his fears of nuclear holocaust, his distrust of the industrial-military complex, his love of movies like The Guns of Navarone and You Only Live Twice, and his sympathy for the soldiers discombobulated by war. "Ghosts of the battlefield," he would call them, putting a fresh slant on the tired old cliché of the video game action hero.

Egoraptor's parody: Metal Gear Awesome

Retired special agent Solid Snake has been dispatched to Shadow Moses, a remote fortified island in Alaska. His mission is to quell and uprising staged by FOXHOUND, a terrorist cell in control of the island's secret: a walking nuclear doomsday weapon called Metal Gear Rex. Little does Snake realize that its mastermind, codenamed Liqud Snake, is actually his genetic twin, part of a government project to breed the ultimate soldier. His lieutenants, furthermore, are psychopaths and assassins with their own twisted agendas. The government calls them traitors, but can anything be that simple in this new world order?

If you think that sounds convoluted, wait until it gets going. Kojima isn't a man to use five words when fifty will suffice and didn't make a game to be played only once. The threads established here would multiply tenfold in games to come, as would the options for combat and stealth. Officially a "sneaking" game, Metal Gear Solid is fast and relatively forgiving; escape often as simple as hiding under a cardboard box. Intensely cinematic with its reaction shots and cut scenes, it's more fondly remembered for toying with that illusion: one boss's weakness being a quick change of controller port.

Metal Gear Solid revolves around stealth combat.

Posted in: 1990s, Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear Solid, PC, PlayStation, PS1, Stealth