THE IMPACT METAL GEAR

KONAMI'S METAL GEAR SOLID INFILTRATED THE PLAYSTATION IN 1998, POPULARISING A GENRE WITH ITS BLEND OF TACTICAL ESPIONAGE ACTION AND CINEMATIC STORYTELLING. FROM CLONED BROTHERS AND CYBORG NINJAS TO EXCLAMATION MARKS AND CARDBOARD BOXES, RETRO GAMER DECODES THE MULTITUDE OF WAYS THAT HIDEO KOJIMA'S GAME LEFT ITS ENDURING FOOTPRINT IN THE SNOW ON THE GAMES INDUSTRY

- ADAM BARNES

At the risk of giving the game an inflated Christly significance, it's impossible to think back on a time when Metal Gear Solid didn't exist. There is the now and the time Before Snake and no in between. But that's the interesting thing, for most of the gaming world Metal Gear Solid was kind of a sudden divine bolt of lightning from out of nowhere.

The Western world hadn't really seen much of Hideo Kojima up until that point, what with a lot of his projects - however significant they are sidelined onto doomed consoles or stuck without a localised version for years. Even the earlier Metal Gear games kind of just passed much of the world by without too much attention, and then, one day in 1997, everything changed. While footage of Metal Gear Solid had already been shown at Tokyo Game Show back in 1996 and earlier, it wasn't until E3 the following year that gamers really got a glimpse of what would go on to be one of the PlayStation's defining games. And from that point on, the hype was tangible.

"One thing you have to remember is that the first time the world saw this trailer, it was not just on some little TVs at the Konami booth," says Richard Ham, who was the design lead on the PlayStation's Syphon Filter. "This was on a gigantic jumbotron screen that towered over everything, I think it was the first time anything like that had ever happened at E3. And as I recall, every hour they would play that trailer, and for the entire convention this would become like appointment viewing - there'd be a huge crowd and so everyone would come and sit and watch. One thing I remember is being surrounded by a bunch of grizzled hardcore veterans screaming and whooping and hollering [as they] couldn't believe what they were seeing." The massive excitement surrounding that trailer even took Hideo Kojima by surprise, and naturally led Konami to push particularly hard on marketing MGS by the time it was released in 1998.