Metal Gear Solid | Code Like It's 198x

“Ignore what the Japanese packaging states,” Edge told its readers in November 1998. “MGS is certainly not an action game.” Solid Snake starts his mission with no weapons, only a packet of cigarettes and a pair of binoculars, and the guards of an Alaskan nuclear weapons base are not there to be shot. They are there to be avoided. Konami’s 1998 PlayStation game made hiding the point of the game and told its story at a length few games had tried, and it had a boss who knew which other Konami games you had been playing.

Fast facts

Developer and publisher: Konami, on the PlayStation; the Windows version was published by Microsoft.
Director and producer: Hideo Kojima.
Designer: Yoji Shinkawa, who drew the characters, the machinery and the backgrounds.
Released: Japan, September 1998 (¥5,800); the United States followed in October and Europe early in 1999. The Windows version came out in 2000.
Discs: two CDs, largely because of the cut-scenes.
Sales: 5.51 million copies by the end of 2004, by Konami’s count, plus 1.27 million of the expanded Integral edition.

Back to Metal Gear

Kojima had made Metal Gear for the MSX in 1987, a top-down game about sneaking past guards. He told Edge in January 1998 that there had been “many things that I wanted to do on the MSX” before the machine “disappeared from the market”, and that he first wanted to make a Metal Gear in polygons when he heard rumours about the PlayStation. He had carried the project in his head since about 1994, but serious work only began in September 1996. It was the team’s first 3D game, Kojima included, and the team of about 25 was large by Konami’s standards: its teams, he said, usually had fewer than ten people.

Working in 3D brought problems of scale. Doors came out too small and tables the wrong size, so the team built the levels as a Lego mock-up and filmed them with a small 8mm camera to plan the views.

They also chose not to make the characters move like real people. In a feature on character animation in August 1998, Edge reported that Konami “threw away all of its motion capture data for the characters in Metal Gear Solid and went back to using key-frame animation”, aiming for “the look of an anime movie”. The motion capture entry follows that argument.

Staying out of sight

Snake’s mission is to get into a weapons depot on an Alaskan island, taken over by FOXHOUND, the special forces unit he once served in. Its members, Edge explained, had “undergone substantial alterations to their basic genetic code” in secret government experiments. Snake takes them on one at a time.

Between those fights, the game is about not being seen. Edge described the rhythm:

plan every move, investigate each passage and study the guards’ patrols and the security cameras;
stay quiet, because guards “are also alerted by unusual sounds” and go to look;
if spotted, hide and wait out a “tense, seemingly interminable” spell until things return to normal;
if hiding fails, fight: guards “can be gunned down, used as punch bags or, more interestingly, as human shields”.

A radar on the screen shows nearby guards, and a radio called the Codec links Snake to his support team. Computer and Video Games found a use for the cigarettes: smoke shows up the infrared beams of hidden alarms, although smoking also drains Snake’s health. Stealth mechanics traces where these ideas came from and where they went next.

Bosses

Each FOXHOUND member is a different kind of fight. Arcade’s guide of April 1999 walks through them:

Boss	The fight
Revolver Ocelot	A gunfight round a hostage who is surrounded by wires and pulleys that kill him if Snake touches them
Vulcan Raven	First in a tank, on a mined snowfield; later on foot
Ninja	Hand to hand, with weapons put away
Psycho Mantis	A psychic who reads the player’s moves (see below)
Sniper Wolf	A duel between two snipers
Liquid Snake	In a helicopter, then piloting Metal Gear REX, then with fists

Computer Gaming World thought the sniper duel was “the only sniper vs. sniper combat I’ve seen in a game, and it’s gripping”. Edge found the fight with Vulcan Raven “a genuinely stressful experience”.

Psycho Mantis and the game outside the screen

Psycho Mantis is the fight everyone remembers, because he breaks into the real world. Computer and Video Games described the start of the meeting in December 1998: Mantis says he can move objects with his mind and tells the player to put the controller on the floor. Then, through the DualShock’s vibration motors, “he moves it!” He goes on to read the player’s mind, which means reading the memory card. Arcade found that if the card held saved games from other Konami titles, “such as Castlevania, ISS Soccer, Suikoden or Silent Hill”, Mantis talks about them. He also knows every button the player is about to press. The way to beat him, Arcade explained, is to plug the controller into the second port, where he cannot read it.

That was not the only trick. At one point the player needs the Codec frequency of Meryl, an ally inside the base, and it is printed on the back of the CD case. Kojima told Computer and Video Games in 1999 that this was his idea. He wanted the game to be “the player, the controller, the PlayStation, the monitor, the manual, the packaging”, all brought into one, just as the PC games he grew up with had asked players to type in anti-piracy codes printed in their manuals. Japanese players, he said, did not much like having to look at the packaging. The reaction surprised him. The memory card scene “wasn’t very well received by quite a few people in Japan”, he said, because hearing the words “memory card” pulls players out of the story and reminds them that they are playing a game.

Movie-length cut-scenes

The story was told in cut-scenes with “multiple camera angles”, and Edge counted them among “the longest examples yet seen in a videogame – over ten minutes’ worth is not uncommon”. That was why the game needed two CDs. It was the first Metal Gear with a fully voiced script, as Retro Gamer later noted. Not everyone was carried along: Computer Gaming World, reviewing the Windows version, thought the translated dialogue made the game feel “like a cross between a James Bond movie and a soap opera”.

Edge scored the Japanese release 9 out of 10.

Sales

Metal Gear Solid sold well but not overwhelmingly at first in Japan. Total Control reported in February 1999 that it had sold 316,000 copies there since September, and Edge, passing on Famitsu’s figures, found it outsold two to one by Nintendo’s new Pocket Monsters game. The rest of the world bought it in much larger numbers. By early 2001 Wired put its sales at 6 million, and Konami’s own list of its million-sellers, as of 31 December 2004, gave Metal Gear Solid 5.51 million copies in Japan, the United States, Europe and Asia, and Metal Gear Solid Integral, an expanded edition, another 1.27 million.

The PC version

The Windows version, published by Microsoft, was on sale by the end of 2000 and came with the VR Missions training levels, which had been sold separately on the PlayStation. Computer Gaming World called it “the best console port ever”, but noted what was missing: the three moments in the Psycho Mantis fight that use the PlayStation’s hardware, reading the memory cards, shaking the controller and forcing the player to change controller ports, were “pretty much lost on the PC, and with it goes some of the game’s creepy charm”.

After Metal Gear Solid

Other stealth games were soon measured against it. When Edge reviewed Looking Glass’s Thief in January 1999, it credited it with stealth elements that “outdo those of Metal Gear Solid”. Kojima went on to Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001) and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004), both on the PlayStation 2. The first game came back in 2004 as Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes for the GameCube, which Edge called “a straightforward, lightly reworked conversion”, made by the developer of Eternal Darkness and adding moves from Metal Gear Solid 2. The series continued to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015), the last Kojima made for Konami before he left the company; the Konami entry covers his departure. In October 2023 Konami re-released the original PlayStation game, running on an emulator, as part of Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection.

Sources

Edge issue 54, January 1998, Metal Gear Solid feature and Hideo Kojima interview: Kojima as “director and producer”; the MSX, the PlayStation and the ten-year gap; the project since 1994 and work begun in earnest “in September last year”; the team’s first polygon game; about 25 staff; the Lego mock-up and 8mm camera; Yoji Shinkawa “in charge of the visuals, the mechanics, character design and backgrounds”.
Edge issue 61, August 1998, pp. 56–65: character animation feature (Konami discarding its motion capture data for key-frame animation).
Edge issue 64, November 1998, pp. 78–80: Metal Gear Solid review (Japanese release, ¥5,800; “not an action game”; FOXHOUND and the genetic experiments; the stealth; the cut-scenes and two CDs; Vulcan Raven).
Edge issue 65, December 1998: Famitsu’s figures, with Pocket Monsters outselling Metal Gear Solid two to one.
Edge issue 135, April 2004, p. 102: Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes review, with the earlier score for Metal Gear Solid (“E64, 9/10”).
Computer and Video Games issue 205, December 1998: Metal Gear Solid feature (the starting equipment; the cigarettes and infrared beams; Psycho Mantis and the DualShock).
Computer and Video Games issue 210, May 1999: Hideo Kojima interview (Meryl’s Codec number on the CD case; the reaction to Psycho Mantis reading the memory card).
Arcade issue 2, January 1999: tips (Psycho Mantis and the Konami saved games; the second controller port).
Arcade issue 5, April 1999: Metal Gear Solid boss guide.
Total Control issue 4, February 1999, p. 135: Japanese sales of 316,000 since the September release.
Retro Gamer issue 3, 2004: Metal Gear Solid the first in the series with a fully voiced script; VR Missions.
PowerStation issue 32, March 1999: Metal Gear Solid as “the first really big PlayStation game of 1999” in Britain.
PC Zone issue 92, August 2000, p. 10: the Windows version (developer Konami, publisher Microsoft, due late 2000).
Computer Gaming World issue 198, January 2001: Windows version review (Microsoft; VR Missions; the sniper duel; the Psycho Mantis moments lost on the PC; the dialogue).
Edge issue 67, January 1999, p. 89: Thief review, comparing its stealth with Metal Gear Solid’s.
Konami Computer Entertainment Japan, “Million-Seller Genealogy”, as of 31 December 2004 (web): Metal Gear Solid 5.51 million units, Metal Gear Solid Integral 1.27 million, Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001) and Metal Gear Solid 3 (2004). https://web.archive.org/web/20050315004002/http://www.konamijpn.com/corporate/million_e.html
Mark Frauenfelder, “Death Match”, Wired, May 2001 (web, secondary): sales of 6 million. https://www.wired.com/2001/05/deathmatch-2/
Wikipedia, “Metal Gear Solid (video game)” (web, secondary): the Windows version’s North American release in September 2000; the Master Collection re-release in October 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Gear_Solid_(video_game)
Wireframe issue 2, November 2018: Hideo Kojima profile, with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015).