Metal Gear Solid: The rise of the cinematic videogame
The first time I played metal gear solid (commonly abbreviated as MGS) I wasn’t expecting it to be anything other than a mediocre action shooter game, being quite young at the time and having not played the previous NES titles I was pleasantly surprised when I ran into a room and alarms started to go off and I was dead within a few seconds whilst crouching and lying on the floor not having thought to learn the controls before playing, then I thought to myself hang on there is more to this game than other similar looking titles such as syphon filter and other FPS titles such as doom and Quake, what if you have to avoid being seen by the enemy or avoid direct combat completely?
Metal gear solid is truly the seminal stealth video game spawning numerous sequels and spin offs including several games, a radio drama, comics, and novels. The series influence is clearly visible in more recent titles such as the splinter cell series and many action adventure games have a so called "stealth level" these days the most recent notable example would have to be the museum infiltration in uncharted 2: among thieves which for me was an extremely nostalgic MGS moment.
I can remember the first time I played MGS from start to finish and at the end I thought "great game, bit too much like a movie though" being quite young at the time I failed to realise how important of an aspect this was in modern video gaming, the 90s was the decade in which games became for want of a better term "socially acceptable" but they had not yet truly become such a powerful story telling medium that could even come close to reading a book or watching film or television, metal gear solid took us one step closer to realising videogames were becoming a powerful story telling device, along with the actual cinematic of the game which included all the camera angles and movements we were seeing in Hollywood film at the time, and on top of all this MGS was fully voice acted which had been done in games before but not to such an extent that it was effectively a movie with regards to its production, as well as having the characters brilliantly voiced they became characters you couldn’t help but care about especially when certain game play elements decided these characters fates in some cases for me the most poignant example of this is when Meryl gets shot by sniper wolf and you have to back track through the game to get the object needed to help her, all this time she was bleeding to death and that created such a sense of suspense and urgency more than I got from any game beforehand or possibly even since.
Metal gear solid is undeniably one of the most important gaming achievements in the last fifteen years if not the most important bar final fantasy VII making Japanese rpg games popular with the western market. Having had a remake created just six years after its release, and with another spin off planned for release this year the franchise isn’t going away just yet especially since a film is also in the pipeline (with Christian Bale expressing interest in playing Snake) which in my opinion is an ultimately pointless and circular adaptation of a videogame more so than any other title considering that the game is arguably a film in its own right.
Here is an example of Metal Gear Solid in the form of a fan made tribute video which includes footage from MGS 1-4 and also the remake for the Nintendo Gamecube and Portable Ops for the Sony PSP
Credit for this video goes to:
http://www.youtube.com/user/majinsweet
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