Metal Gear Solid is one of video gaming’s longest-running, most critically acclaimed and commercially successful series. Hailed by fans as the greatest games ever, scorned by detractors for narrative indulgences, and leaving many in the middle baffled either way, Metal Gear Solid is also notable for its indelible link to creator/director Hideo Kojima. The auteur theory is always dodgy ground with modern big-budget video games, which are made by teams of hundreds, but in this case the stamp of one man’s personality is all-pervasive and impossible to ignore.

Metal Gear (1987)

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The series would come to prominence with Sony’s PlayStation but Metal Gear was first released on 7 July 7 1987 for the MSX2 computer, a popular platform in its native Japan.Hideo Kojima’s debut as a lead designer begins with special-ops soldier Solid Snake swimming to a dock entrance at a military base: over a decade later, so would Metal Gear Solid. The game looked like a top-down 2D shooter, but the way you played had been a pet idea of Kojima for several years – a military game about avoiding confrontation. Though the game can’t quite maintain this focus for its entire duration (the second half is more traditional gunplay) this mixture of systems created the stealth genre.Guards in Metal Gear follow set patrol routes and only react to Snake if they see him. The game’s main building has been lavished with attention to this end, most obviously in the way that guard patrols change depending on what the side of the screen from which you enter from. Metal Gear paid great attention to seemingly trivial details: Snake begins with a packet of cigarettes, which can be smoked but will reduce his health, while he has a radio with which to call a support team for advice. At one point he gets deliberately captured and stages a MacGuyver-esque escape. Trucks move around the base, and sneaking onto the back of one can net you a free ride.Near the end of the game Big Boss, Snake’s commander, gets agitated and radios through:

THIS IS BIG BOSS...



SOLID SNAKE!



STOP THE OPERATION



SWITCH OFF YOUR MSX



AT ONCE.

Metal Gear Solid (1998)

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“ Metal Gear Solid was a phenomenal success and raised the bar for the presentation of narrative in games

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Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001)

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“ MGS2 is a sequel about the problems with of making a sequel

The Metal Gear Solid series is obsessed with talking at and to its players, and the fourth wall is something of an obsession for Kojima. This was the first time he stabbed at it.Metal Gear did well enough to be ported to several platforms, and gain a quick Kojima-less sequel, but after this the series disappeared. Nevertheless the original has embryonic ideas that make Metal Gear, if not a classic, the prototype for one. It would take another eleven years for technology to catch up with Kojima’s vision, and make it Solid.Metal Gear Solid is one of the most important games ever released. Released in 1998 for the PlayStation, from the start it demonstrates sky-high production values: the opening shows Snake approaching a base through the water, the camera angles changing as his commander delivers a mission briefing and actor/developer credits overlay the screen.The game is played in third person from an angled top-down view and, as the opening ends and play begins, the credits continue to roll as the player explores a loading bay. This is like a microcosm of what’s to come: patrolling guards have ‘vision cones’ and can hear as well as see, puddles splash and cause Snake’s feet to leave traces for a few steps, and crawlspaces change the camera to a first-person perspective.One of the key aspects of Sony’s PlayStation was the use of CD-ROM media, which allowed Metal Gear Solid to have full voice acting and orchestral backdrops. The original game’s radio returns as the Codec, through which Snake’s comrades give instructions and, by calling them up in almost any location, advice on the current situation. It’s not quite that simple though: Kojima’s interests are extraordinarily wide, and the Codec reflects this. Your companions discourse on Godzilla, local flauraflora and fauna, cold- war paranoia, trends in military hardware, the nature of war, and above all else on the interwoven thread of fate and genetics.A heady brew, to be sure, if fundamentally a non-interactive way of creating narrative and world texture. But what makes MGS stick in the mind is its imagination and variety in the situations players face: sneaking past guards and security cameras leads to challenges that test every limit of the game’s mechanics. A boss battle with Vulcan Raven, a huge chaingun-wielding mercenary, revolves around Snake avoiding detection and leading him into traps (or guided missiles), while the fight against Sniper Wolf is a pure test of sniping skills (where Snake’s hands tremble and taking a shot knocks the first-person camera severely off-kilter).Kojima’s tricksy nature comes to the fore when the Colonel, Snake’s boss, tells him to contact fellow operative Meryl by using the Codec frequency on the back of the CD case. There is no CD case in the game, but of course MGS is packaged in a real-world CD case – players who check the back find a screenshot showing Meryl’s frequency. In a later sequence Snake is captured and tortured by antagonist Revolver Ocelot, told there are no continues, and that to survive he has to mash a controller button. Ocelot: ‘Don’t dare use autofire [a function on most third-party controllers], or I’ll know.’ And he does!The boss character Psycho Mantis exemplifies MGS, beginning the fight by reading Snake’s ‘mind’: if the player has a memory card containing saves from Konami games like Castlevania or International Superstar Soccer, Mantis comments on their tastes. He talks about your playstyle, based on how many soldiers Snake’s killed and alerts he’s triggered so far (‘You are reckless’). Mantis tells the player to put their controller on the floor, then uses the rumble feature to make it ‘move’ as the screen flashes between different angles. He switches the TV display to a recreation of a standard ‘VIDEO’ mode, except in this case spelled ‘HIDEO’.Metal Gear Solid was a phenomenal success and raised the bar for the presentation of narrative in games. Its complex intricate take on the military-industrial complex, which was at bottom about the role genetics play in fate and free will (Snake is a clone of America’s greatest soldier: so is he fated to follow in the footsteps of his ‘father’?), makes the average video-game plot seem like the Teletubbies. Despite moments of over-indulgence (‘Can love ever bloom on the battlefield?’), it was a quantum leap for action games.What makes the Metal Gear Solid series unique is what happened next. The video-game industry at the big-budget end is largely based around sequels, in a manner quite unlike that of Hollywood. Where movie sequels tend to diminish the original (with exceptions) and by the third or fourth entry have played out the concept, video games have different circumstances. Most obvious is the fact that technology is constantly improving in concrete ways: this is why Metal Gear plays like a prototype for Metal Gear Solid – because 3D gave the original ideas a new form and function.This doesn’t mean that every video-game sequel improves on the original, but some do so by pruning, refining and improving upon an established set of core mechanics. In contemporary times the major third-party publishers have reliable ‘sequels’ as the bedrock of their business: Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series is a juggernaut of samey third-person action that changes the setting but sticks rigidly to formula; Activision are masters at releasing annual entries in the huge Call of Duty series; and EA’s sports titles are perhaps the ultimate case-study of incremental improvement.Metal Gear Solid has lasted much longer than most series and continued to push interactive entertainment forward in a singular manner. Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001) was a game designed to upset player expectations in several ways, and is relatively open about how ambiguous Kojima feels about making a sequel at all.The main tool is lead character, Raiden, who was omitted from the game’s promotional materials in favour of the first game’s hero Solid Snake. MGS2 begins with a short mission featuring Snake (on which all pre-release reports were based) and so players naturally expected he was the sequel’s lead: the prominence of Raiden caused an enormous fan backlash post-release.This is the point. Raiden, it is eventually revealed, is a child soldier raised on virtual reality missions to emulate his hero Solid Snake. Throughout the game he is constantly one step behind Snake, makes rookie mistakes, and has to follow similar objectives. He is a parallel to the player. This point is driven home when Raiden later reads a dog tag he’s wearing and finds it imprinted with personal information the player had supplied much earlier in the game – in a symbolic moment he tosses it away.Near the end MGS2’s world begins to crumble. Raiden is naked after being tortured, and looking for his clothes, when the Colonel starts to lose the plot: he calls on the Codec with a distorted voice, his profile flickers into a skull, and becomes more incoherent as the calls go on. He tells Raiden to ‘switch off the game console now’ and starts repeating lines from MGS. The game itself seems to end as the ‘Mission Failed’ screen appears – except misspelled ‘Fission Mailed’ and with play continuing in the top-right corner.The big reveal is that Raiden is the ultimate example of the U.S. government’s control, genetically-engineered and taught through VR virtual reality systems, and that this mission has deliberately paralleled MGS in order to create a soldier on par with Solid Snake. Raiden has ‘played’ both MGS’s Shadow Moses incident and MGS2’s opening as his hero, and the Big Shell’s challenges are designed to mimic everything Snake has overcome.At the game’s climax Raiden has to fight Solidus, an ex-President of the United States who is also his adopted father and leader of the game’s antagonists. By this point Raiden has learned that the Big Shell setting of MGS2 houses an internet-controlling AI program, designed to maintain America’s military and cultural dominance through censorship, and that Solidus’s true goal is to expose this program. Killing the final boss will thus protect the totalitarian project of the ‘real’ bad guys.The point is obvious: in video games players have to follow a path that has been designed for them by the developers. Any illusion of choice is exactly that. The U.S. government’s aim to control information and, through this, personalities via the Internet internet parallels this. Just before the fight with Solidus Raiden receives a Codec call where his lack of choice is emphasised and he’s told to ‘finish the game’.’ The final boss fight against Solidus ends with Raiden slicing him in half. Good soldier.Though MGS2’s plot is a good subject for chin-scratchers and critics everywhere, it also alienated those who felt the ending was convoluted and dominated by non-interactive cutscenes. There is some validity to these claims, even if part of the point is the removal of agency.As an examination of free will MGS2 goes deeper than most other games, but the darkness of its tone suggests one more thing. The themes imply Kojima didn’t know how to follow up the first game, and didn’t necessarily want to anyway. The fact is that he did. So at the core of MGS2 is the message that, though you may have free will, this doesn’t mean that you can change or deny reality.