For me, there are few games that encapsulate the turn of the millennium better than Metal Gear Solid. This month marks the 25th anniversary of its release on PlayStation in Japan, but it hit UK shelves a few months later in 1999, the same year as the first Matrix movie. While my school peers were mimicking Keanu and dodging invisible bullets, whispers reverberated around the playground of a PlayStation game that was somehow even cooler. You played a grizzled spy who snarled at you through the speakers. You took out helicopters, duelled with cyborg ninjas and spent a lot of time hiding under cardboard boxes. It was all exhilaratingly bizarre, and the hype seemed almost impossible to live up to.
Booting up the game 25 years later, and somehow it still conjures awe. From its wonderfully delivered voice acting (a technical marvel on PlayStation 1) to its inimitable character design, it’s an endearingly bonkers fiction unlike any other. It influenced a generation of game designers, played a huge part in the invention and establishment of the stealth genre, and made a celebrity out of its idiosyncratic creator Hideo Kojima, who remains one of game design’s most recognisable figures.
“When I was a teenager, one of my dad’s mates was talking about a game where you play as a spy,” says Mike Bithell, lead designer of Thomas Was Alone, Tron: Identity and Subsurface Circular. “He gave me the PC port and it was mind-blowing. I hadn’t been exposed to much Japanese culture, so it was just this complete culture shock. Kojima instantly became a god – and I was a massive fanboy from that point on.
“My game Volume is obviously a Metal Gear Solid VR Missions ripoff. I think enough time has passed that I can say that now. A loving homage? That’s better, isn’t it?… I also f-ed up one of my GCSE tests because I’d been up all night completing Metal Gear Solid 2 the night before.”
Like many players, Ulf Andersson, game designer and CEO at 10 Chambers and one of the key leads on Bionic Commando, GTFO and the Payday series, discovered Metal Gear Solid through a magazine demo disc. “The demo was so extensive. It included cinematics, the music and the entire opening of the game. It blew me away … [It inspired me] a lot, in every area. Game design, rendering, level design, storytelling … It’s hard to ignore the impact it has had on me, and us as a team. I’ve seen the MGS2 bridge sequence four billion times!”
Meanwhile, Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, art director on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, was one of few western gamers who had actually played MGS’s wonky 1989 8-bit precursor, Metal Gear, on the NES. “It inspired [Deus Ex] quite a bit, especially Adam Jensen. In 2007 … we had a very costume-centric approach to character design. The main protagonists mostly existed through their outfits. I’ve always been a strong believer that a hero must be able to be identified simply by his or her face. Just like a cartoon. And that’s exactly what Solid Snake does.”
Much like its sneaky protagonist, MGS has infiltrated its way into almost every aspect of pop culture. MGS2 was sampled on Burial’s track Archangel and the Bring Me the Horizon song Shadow Moses is named after one of its locations, and rappers from J Cole to Lupe Fiasco pay homage to it in their bars. It’s not hard to see why. Released in 1999, Metal Gear Solid’s fully voiced dialogue felt like something that had crash-landed from a distant, technologically advanced solar system. Where most of its PlayStation peers featured a smattering of sound effects and irritatingly repetitive character soundbites, MGS’s seamless segues between 3D cutscenes and voice-acted conversations were like Hollywood magic.
The game’s sound design was a direct influence on John Famiglietti, bass player and producer for industrial noise merchants Health. “For me it’s the alarm sound,” he says – a noise that is now employed in a multitude of TikToks. “It’s so crisp and direct! The awesome harshness of the PS1’s bitcrushing on all its audio has always been a major influence on Health – not just MGS, but Silent Hill and other games from the era … I’ve always been trying to chase sounds that cut like that.”
“I think very few sound effects are as widely known as the MGS alert sound,” says Eve Online’s senior system designer, Gabriela Queiroz. “The radio chats are also pretty memorable for the absurd things that were said with utmost seriousness, which just made it even funnier. I think this mix of serious themes, badass characters and [almost] slapstick comedy gives MGS a very unique vibe and style that’s incredibly memorable.”
Just as striking as the much-memed audio are the inimitable character designs of Yoji Shinkawa. Drawing influence from western graphic novel legend Frank Miller and beloved Gundam artist Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, Shinkawa’s unique art brings MGS’s eerie and tension-filled near future to life.
“I have been fascinated with Yoji Shinkawa’s approach to mechanical design,” says Jacques-Belletête. “I was literally obsessed with it! When we started work on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the level of attention and detail I wanted the artists to put into a proper mechanical design aesthetic – for anything from environments, weapons, characters, robots etc – was pretty rare in western sci-fi games. Back then, even experienced concept artists and in-game artists were not always very familiar with that type of precision. It was an uphill battle but it paid off in the end. Even though that aesthetic in DX:HR ended up being among the very best at the time, it was still a far cry from Shinkawa’s stuff – but it was totally inspired by him nonetheless.”
Metal Gear Solid paved the way for an entirely new type of video game: its ambitious narrative harnessed the power of interactivity to facilitate a pioneering approach to storytelling, including famous fourth wall-breaking moments. And while for 10-year-old me MGS was all about revolver-spinning cowboys, invisible cyborg ninjas and men cackling in tanks, beneath all the ridiculous anime-inspired melodrama hid a surprisingly grown-up mediation on the dangers of nuclear war and the far-reaching tendrils of the military industrial complex. With its themes of global corporate corruption, black market nuclear sales and shady Pentagon deals, it was a far cry from Spyro the Dragon.
“The biggest thing that Metal Gear gave permission for was to really think about writing our stories more like screenplays,” says Bithell. “I tend to write most of our games as screenplays as a result. I think the cinematic element of Metal Gear gave a lot of game developers permission to think of our lineage with other entertainment, too. It was one of the first video games to really give a shit about cinematography.”
“Even though Kojima is obsessed with making Hollywood-rivalling movies with his cutscenes, he fully understands that his products are fundamentally games,” adds Jacques-Belletête. “The controls can be quite quirky and complex, major characters will literally tell you during an important dialogue exchange that you must press a button on the controller to perform a specific action, the fourth wall gets broken regularly … This concept of fully embracing the medium’s idiosyncrasies while immersing players in mature stories and themes is seldom seen in AAA games, especially here in the west.”
Metal Gear Solid has stood the test of time because it is entirely its own beast. Like the PlayStation console that hosted it, Solid Snake’s seminal adventure played an integral part in establishing video games a credible art form for a more adult audience.
“PlayStation as a console played a big part in making games grow up,” says Andersson. “People still considered gaming to be for kids, and then comes this game with its cinematic cutscenes and a political thriller theme. This was completely new and it had a huge impact not only on me but also the entire gaming community.”
While Kojima’s dramatic 2015 split with publisher Konami means the series may never get another entry, like other seminal Japanese works of the 90s Metal Gear Solid remains a singular and unrivalled work of fiction. Archaic-feeling controls aside, this PS1 phenomenon feels just as essential today as it did in 1999. In their first attempt at 3D game development, Kojima and his team proved that video games could tell stories as ambitious as Hollywood’s best – it and its sequels inspired creators to push the boundaries of interactivity to this day.
Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 1 is available now
