Metal Gear Review

The origin story is famous and mostly true. The MSX2 could not push enough sprites for a war game about shooting large numbers of people, so the design inverted itself: you start unarmed, you avoid contact, and being seen is a failure state rather than the beginning of the fun. Everything the genre later formalized is here in first draft. Guard sight lines you learn and route around, an alert level that decays once you break contact, cardboard boxes, radio contacts who feed you information and personality, and a base laid out as a stack of floors to be infiltrated rather than a level to be cleared.

It is a top-down game with hard edges, and the friction is considerable by modern standards: inventory shuffling is constant, several progression gates are opaque without a guide, and the console port most people actually played was a mangled version that removes the titular walking weapon entirely. Judged on invention it is among the most consequential games ever released. Judged on play it is a museum piece, and an interesting one.