now playing — metal gear solid
played on playstation
If you would have asked my favorite game of all-time was when I was 12–13, it probably would have been metal gear solid. There’s just something uniquely appealing to a teenage boy about this series of games ; something about it’s blend of totally over the top action, government conspiracy, supernaturalism, near future science-fiction, and it all oozes with Hideo Kojima’s trademark cinematic flair and style. I once heard MGS referred to as, “truly more than the sum of it’s parts”, and I think that rings true. When you take every individual piece, it starts to break down a little — let me explain what I mean
If you took someone aside and said, “Bro I’ve got this new game, you spend most of it hiding from enemies, and watching long cutscenes”. They’d understandably be skeptical. It’s how metal gear solid executes and combines all of it’s disparate elements into a singular vision that keeps it at the top of everyone’s list of favorite playstation games.
Let me give you the rundown on the story, if you don’t already know it — Solid Snake is a legendary soldier, retired after being in a unit called FOXHOUND back in the 80s/90s, and a couple of run-ins with a nuclear capable mecha called Metal Gear. He’s been called back into action because his old unit has gone totally schizo-mode and taken over a nuclear test facility on Shadow Moses island…they’ve got a new metal gear and are threatening to launch a nuke if they don’t get a billion dollars and the remains of Big Boss, another legendary soldier. You’re sent in to save a couple of key hostages, destroy metal gear, stop the nuke, and sexually harass every female tasked with helping you on your mission.
The story, famously, gets much more complicated as it goes, but it’s the tightest and most interesting core story in the entire series. It rewards prior series knowledge, but doesn’t necessitate it. It is complex and interesting, but doesn’t get bogged down in conspiracy and exposition. It is meta, and post-modern, but it doesn’t forget to have an interesting plot along the way. Many of the characters that make their debut here are legendary figures in the franchise, including Meryl, Otacon, especially Gray Fox and Ocelot — “Neither enemy nor friend, I come from a world where such words are meaningless”.
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One fault I would pin on this game in restrospect is the back-tracking and padding. MGS is a short game, completable in under ten hours, and definitely under five if you skip all the cutscenes. The development team has a nasty habit of sending you back through areas you’ve already been through to complete a primary objective — three instances of this stand out to me
- Meryl getting shot by sniper-wolf, and requiring you to run all the way back across the snowfield to get the sniper rifle and run back.
- After getting captured by ocelot, I think you are basically back to where you get the sniper rifle again, so you’ve got do the same salty runback as example #1 all over again.
- After getting to metal gear, you need to run back through some previous areas to do some unsightly business with a temperature sensitive card-key, and this is a major slowdown right at the end of the game.
All of this probably adds like 30–45m of pure gameplay, and without it the game would have been maybe 15–20% shorter. I can see why they padded things out, but on replays these bits are a bit of a pain.
Technically speaking, MGS is maybe the finest game of its era. There are no pre-rendered cutscenes on the disc, it’s all completely run in-engine, and they squeezed every bit of that original playstation. I would particularly point to the sound and voice acting as maybe the best technical aspect…it’s incredible to think that this was only a couple years after the horrible voice acting in the original Resident Evil…the voice acting in MGS1 holds up as an all-time classic ensemble performance. It’s just as good, if not better, than most of the voice acting you hear in games today, almost thirty years on. Sound effects come in a crisp and deep stereo mix, with special attention paid to footsteps, the hum of light fixtures, and the panning of left/right sound to track enemies. It’s all next-level stuff and reminds you not only that sony started off as a sound company, but so did playstation, which can trace it’s DNA back to providing sound chips for the super nintendo.
Part of the legendary status of this game is traced to its presentation — all factors considered I don’t think there’s a more technically ambitious or masterfully presented game on the original playstation. There are certainly games I like more to go back and play, but none are reaching as far. MGS really goes for it, and I appreciate just how adult it was for the time — liquid snake goes on about aborted fetuses and test-tube babies…people being born with defects because of depleted uranium shells. Snake is aggressively flirting with Mei Lin / Meryl / Naomi basically all the time…Otacon expresses the regret of developing powerful weapons, and his grandfather working on the manhattan project. It’s a story that works on it’s own, but is already commenting on the linear nature of story-based games. There’s no coincidence that when Liquid Snake is going on about free-will and how Snake, “loves the killing”, that the camera takes a first person perspective — liquid is talking to YOU the player. Again, no other game of the era realized the creative potential of this medium to such an extent, and executed so deftly.
There are a few more minor issues, and parts that I don’t look forward to revisiting — There is a long action sequence that involves running up a super tall tower and killing like 30 guys on the way up…not good. There is an annoying mechanic where you collect key-cards to advance, but always have to have it equipped to get these doors to open. Why couldn’t they just open by default once the key is in your possession? This is a silly oversight in retrospect, but it’s super annoying to have to swap your active item just to get the doors to open. At least make it so that once the door has BEEN opened, it stays open, like Super Metroid. There are also sections where the primary challenge isn’t hiding, it’s running from these auto-turrets on cameras, which are impossible to avoid. You either need to just run through and take the hits, or use chaff grenades to disrupt all electronics…again it’s just not that interesting of a challenge. The rooms with the cameras really start to get pretty heavy by the last 20% of the game, and you are left with the impression that they are used as a crutch, instead of more solid (ha) level design. There’s probably a good 10–15m of this run-time that is running up and down enormous staircases.
When it’s good though, it’s fantastic. There are slow sections, but when the game is firing on all cylinders (which is 80% of the time), it’s a stunningly great action game. Particularly the whole sequence from the opening, up until Meryl gets shot is probably the tightest 2–3 hours in MGS history. The game also nicely peppers in some boss-battles that all have interesting quirks and depth to them. About once an hour you’ll fight a heavy piece of machinery, or another member of FOXHOUND — these are nicely doled out and keep things incredibly fresh.
Another thing to be noted, and I think this is largely the contribution of Kojima himself, is the consistent oozing of “cool” throughout the experience. MGS has an incredibly interesting and consistent aesthetic. Games are made, even in the late 90s, by teams of dozens of people, so it’s pretty rare for someone’s own personal taste to make it through the collaboration and shine through so strongly, but indeed with MGS it does. Everything from the font treatments, to the blips of the radar/item menus, to the game-over screen, are clearly the flourishes of a man who’s never found a movie he won’t steal from if he thinks something is cool. It’s The Matrix + The Rock + Escape from New York + Ghost in The Shell + Blade Runner + Gundam. Every Kojima game seems like an amalgamation of everything he was enjoying at the time of it’s creation — Like Tarantino he is a masterful collage maker…he is telling his own story and expressing his own vision through a collection and reformatting of other disparate elements.
All and all, it’s hard to see MGS as hugely influential and important to the history of games, and particularly PlayStation — it, along with FFVII truly defined the system as the place for more adult video games — they both defined the PlayStation as the home of narrative/technical excellence, which is still what it’s most known for today. That said, in retrospect it definitely has it’s problems, even adjusting the curve for the technology available at the time. The pacing is breakneck, until the designers necessitate backtracking — the stealth levels are great, until they are stuffed full of machine-gun security cameras and not real guards — The story is brilliant, but some sequences go a little off the rails.
It’s not a perfect game, but I admire how far it dared to reach, and truly pushed the envelope in so many ways. For better or worse, 2026 PlayStation is living in the world that Metal Gear Solid created.
