The year thatMetal Gear Solidwas released, 1998, is by far the most important year for the stealth genre. Though predecessors had included stealth mechanics—including Konami’s ownMetal Gear—advancements toward the turn of the millennium allowed stealth to be elevated from an interesting gameplay aspect to a complete experience. While other important titles dropped in 1998,Metal Gear Solidmanaged to capitalize best on the genre’s newfound potential.
Up until the release ofMetal Gear Solidand its contemporaries, stealth games were built almost exclusively around line-of-sight detection, with the stealth portions usually coming as an afterthought to a different core experience.Metal Gear Solid, however, shifted the genre by creating a title where stealth was not only prominent but essential, a concept that manygames still owe toMetal Gear Solid.
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Metal Gear Solid: A New Complexity to Stealth
The advancement of the stealth gameplay inMetal Gear Solidis a perfect illustration of just how fast technology progressed during the 32-bit era of gaming. While predecessors had played with the idea of sound detection - notably,Metal Gear 2: Solid Snakeintroduced the ability for enemies to detect footsteps as well as shots from unsilenced guns -Metal Gear Solidestablished a whole plethora of new concerns. Now, not only did players have to contend with the usual line-of-sight and noise detection, but they also had to worry about things as simple as leaving footprints behind in freshly fallen snow.
On the other side of the coin,Metal Gear Solidalso equipped players with a handful of new methods for avoiding detection. While players could employMetal Gear Solid’s ever-famous cardboard boxto perplex guards, they could also knock on walls to call a guard over and then slip away undetected. The true genius ofMetal Gear Solidis that, as a consequence of its complexity, it forced players to adopt a better safe than sorry approach to the game and put stealth above all else.
Metal Gear Solid: Stealth is the Only Option
Even within the earliest examples of stealth games likeBeyond Castle Wolfensteinor the originalMetal Gear, the stealth mechanics could be more or less ignored on the path to success. While this is probably true now aboutMetal Gear Solidwith speedrunning tacticsand a greater understanding of the enemy’s AI, at the time,Metal Gear Solidwas extremely difficult to beat without using stealth. It wasn’t just an option; it was the only option.
This was largely due to an idea fromMetal Gear 2: Solid Snakewhere the player was equipped with very little in the way of offensive capabilities to start. It’s not possible to run around shooting down all the guards since Snake just simply doesn’t have enough bullets. Not only this, but the guards tend to have relatively large health pools, whereas Snake is decidedly more vulnerable. As such, in a heads-up fight against multiple enemies, the player is always at a huge disadvantage.
Metal Gear Solid: Rewarding Stealth With Exciting Boss Fights
It seems counterintuitive, but an important aspect of a modern stealth game is to offset sometimes tedious, difficult stealth portions with exhilarating boss fights.Metal Gear Solidis often praised for itsbizarre boss encounter with Psycho Mantis, but the battles against Gray Fox, Vulcan Raven, and Sniper Wolf are equally as important. When played as the developers intended, the game has a beautiful ebb-and-flow between tense stealth and all-out, straight-on boss fights.
The result is a game that has a broader reach than strictly stealth-based or strictly run-and-gun sort of titles. Oddly,Metal Gear Solidmay be one of thebest stealth games of all timepartly due to the fact that it forced players to intermittently take a break from its beautifully designed stealth mechanics.
Metal Gear Solidis available on PC and the original PlayStation.
