Metal Gear Solid And The Uncommon In The Common

I'm going to send you a love letter, my dear. Do you know what that is? It's a bullet straight from my gun to your heart." -- Sniper Wolf

I just published this Edge column about how I think it's important for designers and writers to remember to consider audiences who don't think the way they do. A lot of times people tell me they don't get why the MGS series is my favorite, so I'm finally going to try to tell you.

It's so important to my work in games writing to stay relevant and current. Oh well! Today, I want to talk about the original Metal Gear Solid.

I find it unfortunately impossible to replay these days, as it falls into the weird, choppy adolescence of the PlayStation era. I can't reconcile the precision of the gameplay with the rough look, and certain methods of moving and aiming that became more streamlined in later iterations are no longer intuitive to me. I love old games -- in fact, I often prefer them -- and I am obsessed with the tech driving new ones, but things that fall in between tend to displace me, no matter how much I liked them when they were current.

(Sidenote: I had a similar experience when I got Resident Evil: Code Veronica from Xbox Live Arcade -- as it's far and away my favorite Resident Evil, I was psyched to revisit it, only to wonder how the hell I ever managed to navigate that game with a character that controls like a tank).

Unfortunately, the excellent Twin Snakes remake is only on GameCube and I don't have one

anymore. But between Twin Snakes and original MGS1, I've played the game enough times to have indelible memories, which are only reinforced by the fact the characters, scenes and themes of MGS1 scaffold the rest of the series to come, and reflect themselves in every installment.

Actually, to a certain extent it was 1987's original Metal Gear that established certain key conventions: The unarmed infiltration mission where equipment needs to be procured on site; the necessity of rescuing a scientist; warring factions, and war weaponry so powerful it could destabilize the world.

By the time the series reaches its fourth game, it becomes so strange, a lattice of decades (Snake's first outing was actually in 1987, in the original Metal Gear). By MGS4, it's as much a game about video games as it is about Snake, his clone brothers and the morality of war. Hopefully in the coming days I'll get to explain what I mean by that bit in a way that finally satisfies me.

But the original Metal Gear Solid doesn't really indicate that degree of ambition. It seems, on its face, to be a sort of dewy-eyed homage to the sort of action and espionage films Kojima is known to admire, and owes a lot of its tone and style to them. Solid Snake's character design appears to owe more than a small debt to such stuff; he has the look of Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken from Escape from New York (the eyepatch comes later).

Recall that MGS1 released into a time when cutscenes, particularly FMV, were very much in vogue. This was when people my age used to bring friends home from school just to show them opening cinematics. It was exciting -- "it's just like a movie," was a common refrain, and at the time that wasn't a negative. We felt awed.

The idea at the time was that if only technology caught up a little bit, games could become great works of spectacle, capable of the same kind of emotional impact and thrill that our favorite films could provide. So a game that aimed more toward filmic narrative, with lots of dialogue and character, plentiful cinematics and scenes of dramatic, playable showdowns was very much in keeping with the appetites of the time.

Except even then, MGS was ambitious. To some extent, the series always reached beyond what players expected -- even beyond what they necessarily wanted. The most important convention established by the original Metal Gear is the idea that those who employ you, those who you trust for leadership, may turn out to be your greatest enemy.

Pulling that off relied on a pretty basic video game concept: All gamers know that a "boss" is "that guy you fight at the end". But it'd been a long time since we asked, boss of whom?

In Metal Gear, you learn that your boss --who gives you orders in the game -- is your final enemy, your Big Boss. Big Boss is his name and none will ever know otherwise for years to come.

Not an especially creative naming convention. In fact, it's straight up weird and it stays that way: The bad guys of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake include Big Boss, Running Man, Black Color, Red Blaster and Ultra Box. That's only marginally less blunt than a Mega Man. And, I mean, I haven't even made fun of the name "Solid Snake" yet.

What's weird is that those naming conventions, relics of the late 80s, persisted with the launch of MGS1 nearly ten years later. As credits roll over MGS1s' cinematic intro and Colonel Campbell describes Snake's elaborate counter-terrorism mission, it's a funny note: FOXHOUND's demands include the remains of someone whose name is apparently still Big Boss.

It's as if despite Kojima's excitement about taking advantage of new technology to bring his strange film-hybrid gaming vision one step closer to life, there were some old school concepts he clung to -- and one would be hard-pressed to blame a lack of creativity, as we'll see later. Was it that he couldn't be bothered to reinvent those concepts, or that he had a use for them?

One would have to guess the latter. MGS1 became better known for its bosses than for the particulars of its plot; probably that game's slate of unusual major confrontations remains its defining trait. The succession of Decoy Octopus, Vulcan Raven, Sniper Wolf and Psycho Mantis demonstrates precious little more innovation on the naming side; just like most MGS characters, they get a basic title (the adjective-animal conjunction is particular to members of the FOXHOUND unit). They don't sound very interesting, and yet they are.

When Kirk Hamilton and I did The FFVII Letters, we discussed how simple abstractions can become extremely affecting in context, because they leave us room to fill in our imaginations. Generally we do learn about the personal histories of Snake's enemies and their motivations as we guide him to engage with each -- but one of the singularly interesting things about the MGS games is that the gameplay itself is always an abstraction of the story.

The battle with Sniper Wolf, for example, thematically reflects who the woman is. We learn she became a sniper so that she could exact her revenge for the traumas she suffered in the center of a warzone. The battle of marksmen against her is staged in an open snowfield, where distance and precision are paramount and cover is scarce. The player feels vulnerable, and and the tenuous balance between stalking Wolf to becoming her one-bullet prey is anxious. Most people who play that scene fall silent, breath held.

It's not just cerebral, unusual boss design for its time. The quiet tension of the fight, the footfalls crunched into the snow, the distance from rarely-glimpsed Sniper Wolf herself, and the eerie, lonesome howls of the wolves with which she keeps company are an excellent reflection of her spirit. She is being characterized by the player's gun combat against her, quite rare in games about war. It doesn't really matter what her name is. She's illustrated through the player's experience.

But of course, even people I've met who dislike Metal Gear games remember Psycho Mantis. The most sinister of the FOXHOUNDs, the spectre of his influence haunts the player throughout the game -- a black-clad telekinetic who wears a mask to keep out the thoughts of others, and to veil his face from the burns he sustained after his fear of his father woke his aggression and he incinerated his hometown.

The character is creepy enough, but in another breach with what's perceived to be his obsession with imitating movies, Kojima used Psycho Mantis to famously break the fourth wall between the game and the player. The fight with Mantis is designed so that the player genuinely feels like his game hardware is on the fritz; Mantis can even "read" data from games on other memory cards and report back to the player on what he or she appears to like. Ultimately Mantis can "cause" Snake to defy the player's controller inputs -- to beat him, you have to become "invisible" to him by plugging your controller into the second port.

It's a fun trick now, good for old-school anecdotes; many would consider having experienced it once to be crucial to a well-curated gaming background. But back then, it was revelatory. As with the rest of MGS's boss design, Psycho Mantis' ability to pass through Snake and "invade" the player's space used design to illustrate the character.

In that respect MGS could be said to hold onto some of the primitive traditions of earlier games just so that it could subvert them. Since when did the sprite with a life bar and the word BOSS and little else to recommend him get to express himself through game design in the way that Wolf, Raven and Mantis get to do?

That approach to designing all of the interactions in Metal Gear Solid games -- making them innovative from the design side in a way that gave those moments expressivity from the character side -- is one of the things that especially sets the series apart, and it was MGS1 that defined it.

Best of all, those boss fights characterize Snake, too -- or, they let the player characterize Snake. Who is this ultimate soldier? His world is full of people who think they know, allies and enemies alike, and no one ever seems to be right. Or they all are, to some degree, with the deciding vote cast by the player's concept and play style. Vulcan Raven predicts that Snake will never get respite from war, always haunted by the spirits of his enemies. He'll be shown right a decade later.

That common complaint about the cutscenes, like the director is divorced from the value of interactivity? I advise anyone who thinks that to consider MGS1 more closely.

Throughout MGS, every character and boss reveals to you the ways their childhood and their relationships with family or lack thereof shaped their lens on war and informed their actions. At the end of the game, Snake learns where he himself comes from: He, like his rival, Liquid, are "sons" -- direct copies, more like -- of Big Boss. Isn't it interesting to think of your ultimate rival as your original progenitor, an ending that's a beginning?

Hang onto that idea of begin and end. The series comes right back round to it. Meta. I love meta.

More soon.