To view the other entries in this series, click here
Before Metal Gear Solid, the idea that videogames should imitate films had been totally discredited. “Interactive movies” had been tried in the early 90s on the 3DO, Jaguar and PC, but nearly all had been commercial and critical failures (the 7th Guest and Phantasmagoria being notable exceptions). They were supposed to combine the best narrative elements of film with the dynamism of videogames, but in fact only brought together sub-B-movie actors with horribly frustrating and limited “gameplay”.
After publishers got bored of throwing good money after bad, “Full Motion Video” or FMV sequences were used sparingly, simply book-ending the sections where the player had more control. So in the likes of Resident Evil, Command & Conquer and Final Fantasy VII, you’d get a quick slice of completely non-interactive film or animation to rapidly advance the plot, between much longer sections where you’d be playing the game. It worked well enough for all those (hugely popular and critically acclaimed) games, but there was nonetheless a jarring disconnect between the plot and game segments. Watching the story unfold would often serve only to make the player think about the game they could be playing if it weren’t for constraints on processing and graphics capabilities, and it would feel disappointing to return to controlling a jerkily animated and less powerful version of the character you’d just seen acting far more smoothly and realistically in high-end 3D graphics.
Hideo Kojima, the director of Metal Gear Solid, was among the first to realise that plot exposition could be done better within a game engine. He saw that he could quickly and easily experiment with camera positions in a way that would make a director of even the highest-budget Hollywood film envious; and this was crucial for the story he wanted to tell (in which players would at times be asked to sit and listen to characters with names like “Revolver Ocelot” talk about the difficulties they had in childhood). Playing Metal Gear Solid today, it still strikes you how well the non-playable action sequences are put together, the quick cutting and unusual camera angles helping to maintain interest in an often ludicrous plot. This simply wouldn’t have been possible in the glossy but inflexible medium of FMV.
Yet there are many who’ll be reluctant to celebrate the way Metal Gear Solid blazed a trail for narrative-heavy games. There’ll be nearly as many who think it’s preposterous for a game steeped in paranoid conspiracy theories and adolescent fantasies to demand the patience from its players to watch cut-scenes that frequently last over twenty minutes. And there will be still others who think that Kojima is a pretentious idiot, a man inflicting scarcely interactive games on the world because he never realised his true dream of becoming a director in the film industry. Yet those who think this way lose sight of how pioneering his first Playstation game was, not just in the way it told its story, but crucially, in the way it asked you to play.
MGS genuinely provided the “Tactical Stealth Espionage Action” it promised on the box, and on consoles at least, no-one had seen anything like it (err, at least not since the first Metal Gear games on the NES -Ed). The idea that it was to better to sneak around a difficult situation than to rush into it head-first would have been dismissed as boring by most developers, who had overlooked the potential to create tension and suspense from asking players to avoid conflict. Yet the slower paced, risk-assessment play was often more thrilling than a thousand polygonal explosions, and who doesn’t fondly remember hiding in a cardboard box, hoping and praying that this time the guards wouldn’t stop to ask, “huh?! Who put that there?”
Tense.
And hiding in boxes was just the beginning of the left-field thinking. “I can read your mind! I KNOW you like soccer!” Psycho Mantis would tell you, when he discovered your ISS Pro 98 save game on your memory card. He’d then infuriatingly read your every move while you tried to defeat him- using his “psychic powers” to counter each button press at the moment it was made. Then after he pounded away at you and you were moments from death, a member of your support team would call and say, “Snake! I got it! Plug your controller into the player 2 port! It’s the only way you’ll be able to circumvent his mind control!”
This brings us to the paragraph where I should probably write about Metal Gear Solid as the pinnacle of post-modernism, except I don’t particularly want to get bogged down in that. Tim Rogers has already written
enough on the subject to satisfy even the most pretentious of wannabe videogame academics, and in truth, he’s done it better than I ever could. Yet regardless of whether applying artistic terminology to games turns you
on or
off, there’s no denying that Metal Gear Solid used unusual techniques to blur the line between the player and the game in a way that hadn’t been done before, and set an agenda that the likes of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and even Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts would later build upon with great success.
Still tense
Yet the art-house interpretation is really just a distraction, a shiny looking cherry atop of what it is that truly makes MGS great: the ride it takes you on. You don’t sit back pontificating over whether or not they just “
broke the fourth wall” as you play it; you hang onto the edge of your seat, bouncing up and down with anticipation to find out what will happen next to Snake and his cohort of treacherous companions. Like a DVD boxset of 24, it begs you to consume it in as few sittings as possible, and there can be little doubt that thousands upon thousands of people must have been lured into rushing through it in one glorious indulgent weekend. Yes, the videogame world we now live in has become saturated with games that have dull stories and tedious “stealth gameplay”; but don't allow Metal Gear's legacy to impede your judgement of the game. This is Kojima's masterpiece, one which he himself hasn't been able to match since, and no game since has been able to grip so strongly and consistently from start to finish.
There’s a parallel universe somewhere where the Shenmue games were successful enough to recoup the $70m they cost to develop. On that version of Earth, being able to talk to every in-game character was more important to the game-buying public than being able to steal every in-game vehicle. They didn’t just want to see headshots in ever-increasing resolutions; they wanted to play in grander, lusher worlds that forced you to rethink what games could do.
