Only Half-Life, which debuted alongside Solid, attempted something similar. ![]() Solid presented sequences every bit as flashy and movie-like as Parasite Eve’s without ever shifting away from the chunky polygonal character models the player controlled the rest of the game. Games with greater cinematic aspirations leaned on Final Fantasy 7-style full-motion video interludes, as seen in Parasite Eve. Real-time cutscenes in 1998 rarely pushed beyond simple reaction shots and static character dialogue, even in something as artful as Ocarina of Time. Compare the elaborate multi-angle cutscenes present in Solid with what passed for cinematic sequences in its contemporaries, like Spyro or Tenchu. Solid established a new standard for game tech, breaking down the divisions between game action and story sequence. What made Solid’s military drama so striking was the way it was presented (in all its ludicrous glory) through a near-seamless graphical engine. Solid contained roughly an hour of meticulously ‘shot’ and directed cinematic sequences but the thing also roared like a dinosaur for no reason beyond the fact that it looked cool in cutscenes. The eponymous Metal Gear super-weapon featured a tactical rail gun delivery system based on real science. Ripped-from-the-headlines political anxieties like gene therapy and black-market nuclear sales sat side-by-side with conspiracy theory fodder, like mind-reading and customized killer viruses. Heavy on scripted cutscenes, Solid presented a hard-boiled military adventure crammed with obsessively researched technical details, ominous political themes, and a cheerful willingness to embrace the fantastic in service of a rollicking tale. Director Hideo Kojima essentially put together an interactive Tom Clancy movie for PlayStation. This is not to diminish the very real and impressive forward strides Solid took to advance the state of the art in video games. ![]() Rather, they were concrete references to the MSX/2 computer game upon which Solid based its entire design, 1990’s Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Most players didn’t realize that the script’s references to things like “Zanzibar Land” weren’t merely exercises in world-building. Metal Gear on the MSX Screen by Oleg Roschin, KonamiĪs a result, fans who had graduated from NES to PlayStation felt occasional flashes of deja vu while playing Solid - so many tank hangars, cardboard boxes and cigarettes! - yet only a handful of import enthusiasts understood how much Solid truly owed to what had come before. and European audiences only saw the NES port of the game, which had reshuffled and even removed key elements from its initial release on the MSX home computer. Though Solid was the third entry in the Metal Gear franchise, only the very first game (which was titled simply Metal Gear) had been localized for release outside Japan. It’s worth noting that at the time, few players-or at least, few American and European players-realized how much of Metal Gear Solid’s cutting edge design actually amounted to 8-bit concepts that had been tarted up with stylish, 32-bit trappings. Somehow, it carried a torch of innovation that helped shine a light for the medium’s future while simultaneously locking the Metal Gear franchise itself into a recursive, backward-facing loop from which it never fully managed to escape. Half-Life! Xenogears! Ocarina of Time! Spyro the Dragon! Thief! Parasite Eve! Pokémon! And, of course, Metal Gear Solid.Įvery one of the big games of 1998 deserves to be enshrined as a legend, but Konami’s Metal Gear Solid stands out from the rest for the seemingly impossible contradiction it embodied. if this script had been given the green light.In the annals of video game history, the tail end of 1998 went down as what we colloquially refer to as “a real humdinger.” Rarely have so many landmark video games appeared within a few turns of the calendar page. Yeah shocking, right? Well, he also plans on "removing certain genetic limitations, and retaining the benefit of the memories and experiences of the original subject."Īfter this revelation, it's interesting to think just how closely the Metal Gear series could have followed Escape from L.A. Not only does the script describe several characters with super-human abilities, it also reveals that the movie's antagonist clones Snake in an attempt to create the world's most elite soldiers. The site posted pieces of the script, and it's pretty amazing reading it as you can imagine several parts that could have easily have fit into a Metal Gear game. Aint it Cool News recently won an eBay auction for a previously unreleased and unapproved Escape from L.A. ![]() It's never been a secret that Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid series was inspired by Kurt Russell's Snake and his exploits trying to escape a few cities, but we never really knew how close those similarities are until now.
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