Metal Slug | Code Like It's 198x

In 1996 the arcades belonged to polygons, and Metal Slug was made of hand-drawn sprites. SNK’s Neo Geo was six years old, the side-scrolling shoot-’em-up looked like a leftover from the 1980s, and Edge’s reviewer opened by asking whether a game like Green Beret could still “impress today’s 3D-obsessed gamer”. Metal Slug’s answer was detail. Enemy soldiers sit around talking or cooking until they spot the player, then leap up, scream and run away. Prisoners tied up in the scenery hand over weapons when they are freed. And the tank of the title, a small armoured vehicle called the Metal Slug, can jump. The game came not from SNK but from Nazca, a small studio of former Irem staff, and SNK liked it so much that it bought the studio.

Fast facts

Developer: Nazca, founded by former Irem staff; SNK bought the company in 1996.
Publisher: SNK.
Hardware: the Neo Geo, as an MVS arcade cartridge and as a home cartridge (24 May 1996 in Japan).
Players: one or two at once.
Length: six missions.
Later versions: Neo Geo CD (1996); Sega Saturn and PlayStation (both 1997, Japan only).

First sight

Metal Slug was first shown at the 1995 JAMMA amusement machine show in Japan. Edge’s report in December 1995 picked it out among the third-party Neo Geo games SNK showed there, calling it “a decent ’80s-style Neo Geo blaster” that “proved the genre could be parodied. Imagine a humourous version of Contra with the ability to climb into tanks”. By July 1996 the arcade game was out, and Edge described the plot: “It’s well into the 21st century, and General Morden and his rebel army have staged a coup d’état”, stealing a top-secret tank. The players are Marco Rossi and Tarma Roving of the resistance, and the job is to stop Morden before the tank is finished.

How it plays

The players run, jump, shoot and throw grenades. Prisoners of war are tied up along the way; free one and he gives the player a bonus item. The heavier weapons come that way, lettered pick-ups that Edge’s preview listed as a shotgun, a flame thrower, a heavy machine gun and a rocket launcher.

On some levels the Metal Slug itself is waiting. GamePro gave its full name, Super Vehicle-001. It has a cannon and a machine gun that rotates to fire in any direction, it can jump, and a player can crouch inside it. It has its own energy bar and can take several hits. At any moment the player can bail out and send it charging into the enemy, where it explodes. GamePro found that move “too easy to execute accidentally”, since it needed only two buttons pressed together.

The comedy was the part reviewers remembered. Edge’s preview noted weapons “far larger than the characters themselves” and a plane “not entirely dissimilar to a child’s toy”. Computer and Video Games promised “tons of little details” that a player would not notice until the third or fourth time through, from bonus points hidden in the scenery to a pig on a ledge in the fourth level.

What it was built on

The Neo Geo has no tiled background layer; as the Neo Geo entry explains, it draws almost everything, scenery included, from sprites. That suited Nazca’s art. In a 1996 interview in the Japanese magazine Neo Geo Freak, later translated into English, the developers said the tank began as a way to avoid “normal player characters”, and that once they made the tanks “jump, crouch, and move around, they started to seem like living creatures”. They wanted everything on screen “to be immediately and easily understandable, with just a glance”.

Retro Gamer later traced the look back to the team’s Irem games: Undercover Cops, Gunforce 2 and In the Hunt “all bear a distinctive stylistic resemblance to Metal Slug”. It credited the sprites and animation to an artist known as Akio and the backgrounds to one known as Susumu.

Reviews

Reviewers liked it and complained that it was over too soon. GamePro in August 1996 called it “a soldier-slamming, side-scrolling, tour de force” that “pushes the Neo•Geo to the edge”, but found that six missions “are simply not enough”. Edge reviewed the home cartridge in November 1996 and gave it six out of ten. The game was “addictive and totally hectic”, with “plenty of great ideas and some beautiful scenery”, but it “only takes a few hours to complete”. The verdict: “an imaginative, humorous and enjoyable step back into the past… Brief, unfortunately, being the operative word.”

Saturn and PlayStation

SNK’s own staff converted the game for the Saturn and the PlayStation, and both versions came out only in Japan. The Saturn one needed extra memory. Sega Saturn Magazine explained in June 1997 that it came with a RAM cartridge that added a megabyte to the console, and with “some nifty compression and some inter-level loading” it reproduced the arcade game “pixel for pixel”. The magazine was sorry that no one had picked it up for Europe. Computer and Video Games reviewed a Japanese import copy in August 1997, found it “far too easy to complete”, and still enjoyed it: “just because we’ve moved into the 32-bit era dominated by polygons, sprite-based games can still work well”. The PlayStation version came out in Japan later in 1997.

A hit that did not pay

Metal Slug was popular, but it did not make SNK much money. Retro Gamer’s 2007 history of SNK explained why. Arcade players who would pay $1 for a credit on Sega Rally or Time Crisis in their special cabinets were “loath to pay half that for a turn on Metal Slug in standalone form”. The home Neo Geo cartridge was hard to find outside Japan: it was a “slow burner” in America and Europe, and by the time players wanted it, stocks had run out. SNK recovered some of its costs through the Saturn and PlayStation conversions, but after an arcade original and four home versions in two years, Metal Slug “had underperformed Fatal Fury by almost half — not in sales, but in profit”. Retro Gamer reckoned it took three years for the series to make SNK any profit.

The shortage made the original home cartridge a collector’s item. Edge reported in January 2003 that “the original Metal Slug was an unexpected hit, hence its low production numbers”, and that an American dealer had sold two copies, one for $2,450 and a Japanese one for $2,260.

The series

SNK bought Nazca in 1996 to secure the sequels, and the same team went on to make them under SNK’s name. Metal Slug 2 followed in 1998 and Metal Slug X, a reworked version of it, in 1999. The sequels added the jokes the series is now known for: in Metal Slug X, Edge noted, “over-eating will cause characters to get fat and move more slowly”. Metal Slug 3 came in 2000.

SNK went bankrupt in 2001, and the series passed to Playmore, the company its founder had set up to take over SNK’s games (later SNK Playmore), and to new developers. Edge found Metal Slug 4 (2002) a pastiche that lacked “the vision and coherency” of the earlier games. SNK Playmore moved the series off the Neo Geo to Sammy’s Atomiswave arcade board in 2004, and in 2006 made Metal Slug 3D for the PlayStation 2, which Edge thought had lost much of the series’ charm in the move to polygons. The Metal Slug Anthology of 2007 collected the series for the PSP, and its opening screen celebrated the series’ tenth anniversary with the words “Metal Slug since 1996”. The original game has since been re-released on later consoles, and the series has continued with new games, including the strategy game Metal Slug Tactics in 2024.

Sources

Edge issue 27, December 1995: JAMMA show report (“a decent ’80s-style Neo Geo blaster”; the Contra comparison).
Edge issue 34, July 1996, Arcadeview: Metal Slug preview (developer Nazca/SNK, “Out now”; the plot, Marco Rossi and Tarma Roving; the four weapons; the prisoners; the tank’s self-destruct charge; the oversized weapons and toy-like plane).
GamePro, August 1996: Neo Geo review (Super Vehicle-001; two players; six missions; “tour de force”; the suicide-tank move).
Edge issue 38, November 1996: home Neo Geo review, six out of ten (the Green Beret question; the enemy soldiers; freeing hostages; the jumping tank; “a few hours to complete”).
Sega Saturn Magazine issue 20, June 1997, pp. 22–25: the Saturn version and its RAM cartridge; Japan-only release.
Computer and Video Games issue 189, August 1997: Saturn import review (the tank; the hostages; the hidden details; the pig).
Official US PlayStation Magazine vol. 1 issue 1, October 1997: Metal Slug listed as a PlayStation import.
“Metal Slug – 1996 Developer Interview”, Neo Geo Freak, October 1996, translated by shmuplations.com (web, secondary). https://shmuplations.com/metalslug/
Retro Gamer issue 34, 2007, p. 86: Metal Slug Anthology review (PSP, February 2007; Nazca; the Irem games; Akio and Susumu; “Metal Slug since 1996”).
Retro Gamer issue 39, 2007, pp. 76–77: Neo Geo history (Kawasaki buying Nazca; the slow sales in America and Europe; stocks exhausted).
Mike Tooley, “SNK (part three)”, Retro Gamer issue 40, 2007, pp. 66–67: buying Nazca to secure the sequels; arcade prices; the in-house Saturn and PlayStation versions; profit compared with Fatal Fury; three years to profit.
Retro Gamer issue 116, July 2013, retro diary: the Neo Geo home release on 24 May 1996.
Edge issue 57, April 1998: Metal Slug 2.
Edge issue 71, May 1999: Metal Slug X preview (the fat characters).
SuperGamePower (Brazil) issue 77, August 2000: Metal Slug 3.
Edge issue 119, January 2003: Neo Geo collecting feature (the “unexpected hit”; the $2,450 and $2,260 sales) and Metal Slug 4 review.
Edge issue 166, September 2006: Metal Slug 3D review (PS2, SNK Playmore).
The Neo Geo and SNK entries: the Neo Geo’s sprite-only display; SNK Playmore’s move to the Atomiswave in 2004, reported by Edge.
Wikipedia, “Metal Slug (1996 video game)” (web, secondary): Neo Geo CD release in 1996; Saturn release in Japan on 4 April 1997 and PlayStation release in Japan on 7 August 1997; later re-releases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Slug_(1996_video_game)
Wikipedia, “Metal Slug” (web, secondary): Metal Slug Tactics, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Slug