Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 257: Metal Gear Solid

Episode Date: November 4, 2019

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Kat Bailey, and Shane Bettenhausen celebrate Death Stranding by revisiting the game that allowed Hideo Kojima the luxury of spending millions of dollars on name-dropping self-indulgence in the first place: Metal Gear Solid.

This week in Retronauts, there are no continues, my friend. of Retronuts. That's right. The podcast about old games starring old people. Your favorite old people, such as myself, Jeremy Parrish, other old people here with me in this tiny box include... Hey, it's Bob Mackey, and Decoy Octopus was an inside job, everybody. Genetically enhanced super soldier, Kat Bailey. I guess fellow oldster Shane Bettenhausen. I know you're going to be so ages on this podcast. I mean, we are all old snake here. But that's not what we're talking about. No, we're talking about middle-aged snake. And this is our first Metal Gear podcast ever, right? We've never talked about this series before, and I can't believe it's been, you know, 12 years that we've been running this show and never once even mentioned Metal Gear at all. It's so weird. So we're here to rectify that issue.

Okay, we're being ironic. Yes, we talked about Metal Gear before, and we've only really done overviews of the series, plus a deep dive into Metal Gear Solid 3 that Bob hosted it a few months ago, and that is kind of the new model we're using for Retronauts. We're talking more in-depth about games that really merit it, and I can't think of a series that, well, okay, there are some series that married it more than Metal Gear, but not a lot.

Metal Gear is a very interesting franchise, and it's also dead. Oh, man, now you're depressing there. Geez. Wow, you want to go back. We want to go back 20 years in time to when it was new, young, fresh, vital, and lively, and talk about the original Metal Gear Solid for PlayStation. So that's what we're doing this episode. I have to say Metal Gear is not dead. Survive is a pretty good game.

Oh, God. What? Are you kidding me? Yes, it's a good game. No, it's not a good Metal Gear solid. You guys are oldsters. It's not a good Metal Gear solid game, nor is it a successful better at all. It's keeping with the kids' trends in being a survival game. It does a good job of mixing Survival and Metal Gear.

I've said my piece. It could be any game. They just put Metal Gear on the title. So my statement that Metal Gear is dead was not a reference to the quality of survive, but rather to its sales, which were approximately 10. And therefore... Oh, I tried to play it online. Yeah, I know.

Yeah, Konami is, I think, you know, as much as much as they want to be out of video games. I think that was their attempt to annualize franchise turned Metal Gear into a platform, a game as a service, and it failed. So they're going to be like, whatever, FIFA and Bomberman. That's all good. So that's Metal Gear for you, folks. But like I said, we're turning our gaze back 20 years to the original Metal Gear solid,

not, of course, the original Metal Gear franchise, as we have discussed before. On this very podcast, began in 1987 on the MSX computer. and there was a sequel on MSX that we never got in America. There was also Snake's Revenge, which, okay, it existed. But Metal Gear Solid was for all intents and purposes, sort of the real beginning point of this series as a going concern, as a big video game property that the world really cared about. Because Metal Gear Solid was a breakthrough game.

It was cinematic. It was impressive. It was like a movie that you played. And also like a novel that you read while. you were playing the movie, it was a lot of things all at once. And it really made an impression. And, you know, I think if you remember the early, you know, the pre-launch days of PlayStation 2, you remember just the sheer amount of hype surrounding Middle Gear Solid 2 and the

trailers for that and the teasers. Well, you're skipping to the end. Well, I'm just saying, like, that is a sign of just how much impact Middle Gear Solid had. Well, how it changed the industry. It hit so hard. Yeah. It hit so hard and made such an impression that people were like, the next game is It's going to be amazing.

So you and I are old. I'm curious, what was your first ever inclination that this existed? I remember mine. It was a screenshot. Metal Gear Solid. It was a screenshot. It would have been, you know, 1997, early, 1997 in game fan towards the back. A one screenshot of a, like, a logo or a piece of the CG trailer.

And I remember thinking, having played Metal Gear and Snake's Revenge and having played Snatcher and, like, I was excited. I remember like, it wasn't a big deal. It wasn't like a new Mario or, you know, a new Final Fantasy. But it was like, oh, that thing that I liked on NES from that guy who made that other game I liked, that's kind of cool. They're bringing that back. Yeah. Oh, go ahead.

I knew about Metal Gear because I had played it on the NES. I had read about Snake's Revenge. But I didn't really think about it very much. It wasn't exactly a huge fan. And I was a PC gamer for the most part in the late 90s. But the hype around Metal Gear Solid was such that it filtered through even to me. So I was aware that this game existed and that it was a follow-up to the original Metal Gear. I didn't know anything about it until I finally got a PlayStation.

I was like, what should I buy? And people are like, you must play Metal Gear solid. And NES Metal Gear had a cachet. It wasn't ever considered like an A-plus game. But people who played it, like the complexity of it, the weirdness of it. We all showed up as number one on the Nintendo Power Power Pole once. Once. Yeah.

Just once. But it was something you talked about to your friends on the playground and like, yeah. So I'm a feeling you kind of had the same like, oh, I'm glad that's coming back. I thought of it as that game where I would get in the truck. And I'd be like, why I'm in this truck? What's going on? Why is the truck started to move? You feel asleep?

Yeah. Yeah, my first, I think, awareness of it was, it must have been E3, 1998. Well, so there was a trailer. The next generation, was it 97 or 98? E3 997, which was the first E3 ever went to. Okay, so it was 97. We drove down. It was in Georgia.

And in Konami's booth, there was like a 30-inch TV showing a very short clip of Metal Gear Solid CG cutscene. There was like a very brief CG cutscene that's not even in the final game, showing Ninja logo, like a little bit of what the game would kind of be like but in CG. And I remember like, wow, that looks amazing. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I remember seeing a story about it on Next Generation.com.

E398. E398, it was playable because then it came out just a few months later. No, it was 97. And I remember because I saw it on the I remember reading the article on a computer in my student newspaper office and I did not work on the student newspaper during E398, so it must have been 97.

So therefore I was like, wow, that's a thing. And I don't think at that point I had quite gotten cynical enough about people bringing old properties into 3D that I was like, that's probably not going to be good. So it immediately went on my list with Mega Man Neo as a game that I was super stoked about. Right. Well, and this was also, you know, this game was shown the year the Final Fantasy 7 came out, which changed everything, right? And this was kind of the next thing of like a Japanese development team kind of stepping up, reaching far beyond the normal grasp of game design and direction. And, you know, I was tangentially aware of Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake, even though I never played it. It was never available in English anywhere.

Had you played it or seen it? No, I didn't really know about it until I think a little after Metal Gear Solid came out because the manual, the American manual for Middle Gear Solid was thick and went into a lot of story detail. And it talked about stuff like Zanzibarland. And I was like, what is that? Yeah, like in the very beginning. And in game, they actually had like really cool little cinematic briefings where they were talking to Solid Snake and. and also you could go through and read the recaps for both of the games. The supplementary material just in game was really phenomenal.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you're right. There was all the supplemental stuff within the game. So that was probably the first time I was like, wait a minute, there was a second Metal Gear game, but it was called Snake's Revenge. What is this Metal Gear too solid? This is early internet. This is used, no Wikipedia.

I mean, like, right. I'd been online for a few years by that point. So had you played Snatcher? No. So I had played Snatcher. I had a Sega CD. I did not own a Sega CD until 98. Okay, well, so Snatcher was, you know, kind of a legendary thing, too, and I realized, oh, this is by the guy who made Metal Gear, Gear, and then there was also Police Knots, which wasn't ever in English, but I remember, like, when that did get ported to Saturn, I imported. Anyway, so at this point, the guy making Meliger Solid, he wasn't this Altru, this, you know, grand vizier of gaming that we think he is now, but he was, like, this guy with a point of view, and clearly Metal Gear Solid was going to be this, like, more serious adult narrative. And I remember as a kid, I was, like, 16 or whatever, maybe 18, being very excited that he was, that he was. That he was. That he was. He was. That he was. He was. That he was. He was. He was. He was. He was.

was reaching for this different point of view. Yeah, I didn't have an impression of what the game was going to be like until I played the official PlayStation magazine demo. And that was what made me say, holy crap, what the hell? Bob, what about you? What was your first impression? Like Cat, the corrupt gaming press told me I needed to be excited about this game. And my only experience with Metal Gear is I never rented it as a kid.

But once I had access to the internet, of course, I emulated every NES game I could never play. And I was like, why are they making a sequel to this game where I die in the first three screens? This game doesn't make any sense. But then I trusted magazines and I played the demo and it was really like that the demo won me over. I played it a million times. But now in retrospect, it seems odd that the guy who was beginning to fashion himself as a designer of these extravagant Japanese adventure games went on to redefine the action game because those games had no systems.

It was like, select every item on the screen until you run out of dialogue, then go to the next screen. And Metal Gear was all about systems. Well, you know, Stature did have the shooting bits. Yeah, please not say too, but they were garbage. Yeah. You know, actually, as I think about it, I was kind of primed for this game because, you know, I loved Metal Gear when it came out on NES. But that was 1988. And once the Super Nias came out, I had to trade in my suit, my NES to be able to buy games and stuff for the Super NES.

So I think in 1995, I took a road trip with my girlfriend at the time over the summer. and we stopped along the way to stay over at her cousin's house instead of, you know, renting a hotel or whatever, or staying at a hotel. And when we got there, her cousin's family was like out, so we just kind of let ourselves in and, you know, killed some time. And he had an NES. And I was like, wow, I remember this. And he had metal gear. And I was like, wow, I remember that. And I plugged it in and played it and thought, this is really, this is kind of cool.

It's old, but, you know, it's dated, but it's still good. I remember this and it was nice. So when they announced Metal Gear Solid, I was like, oh, yeah, I remember that pretty recently, and this is going to be cool. I mean, if you look at the context of the events at that time, we had Final Fantasy 7, which in 1997 had kind of redefined how we saw cinema and console games. But so many games were still kind of cartoony mascots, platformers, that kind of thing, light stories. The idea of having a heavy-duty story in a game was relatively new. The idea of having cut scenes and set pieces and that kind of thing was still – you saw it on PCs for the most part – not as much on consoles. So when Metal Gear is solid –

Even cutscenes on PC were pretty – still pretty new. Yeah, I think Resident Evil were the first baby steps towards – I mean, CD-ROM format was still pretty new across the board. The AAA action game, as we know it today, the God of War, really got its start with Metal Gear Solid. I would say fall 1998 was the breaking point for video games. I mean, look at what else came out. In addition to, yeah, you had Aquarina of Time. You had Thief the Dark Project.

You had Half-Life. I mean, that redefined how, that was 98. That redefined how cinematic gaming worked, too, because it puts you in the cinema. I feel like Metal Gear Solid was kind of the third-person perspective to what was in, you know, half-life, a first-person perspective. So they were kind of like two sides of a coin. Yeah, the 3D games, as we knew them, had gotten started in 1995, and, of course, developers were struggling so much to really make it work and think in these new dimensions. And maybe 1998 was a year that they finally, everything clicked into place, and they were like, we get it now.

98, we also had Parasite Eve. We also had Mega Man Legends, which I think is greatly underappreciated for what it kind of innovated in terms of, like, the cinematic presentation. Because it had, you know, character acting and it had facial animation and stuff like that. That's not. Yeah, like that was, it was really kind of groundbreaking. So, so Metal Gear Solid was definitely part of a bigger movement, but I feel like it did what it did better than anyone else. In reading historically, Kojima talks about how, you know, he was, the plan was to make the greatest game ever made. And this began as a 3DO.

Nice and modest. Right. It began as a 3DO project. It was going to be a third Metal Gear game for the 3DO. In fact, like the police nots pilot disc for 3DO has like an early image with Snake and Meryl and Foxhound art in it. it. And then they got moved over to PlayStation when 3DO kind of tanked. And I think they saw what Square was doing. We're like, well, we've got to do that too. Yeah.

Should it put it on the MX or whatever. MSX? No. They came to PCFX. It would have been all cartoon. What followed the 3DL? The M2. Yeah, put it on the M2. I should have waited for Neon.

Yeah, so you mentioned that they saw what Final Fantasy 7 was doing. And for a while, the cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid were going to be CG. And there's, you know, there's test footage out there. I think they've included it in some of their bonus discs of pre-rendered. you know, really kind of bad, crappy solid snake fighting genome soldiers. I'm so glad they didn't go that direction because what they ended up doing... The real-time is beautiful. Well, what they ended up doing, yeah, the real-time approach, I think, was far more influential

and far more significant because it showed that, hey, you don't have to break away to basically what amount to fancy cutscenes from Ninja Guidon from 1988 to be able to tell a story and game. You can use the same models that people play as and create this sort of seamless immersion, even though you are taking away control from the player. And, I mean, you know, even Half-Life took away control from the player. It was just less overt about it. It gave you the impression that you had some control over what was happening.

Well, I think the Half-Life comparison is apt. In your essay, you wrote about this on U.S. Gamer, you talked about, you know, how the diagetic nature of these cutscenes really put you in the game. And I do believe it because as much as I like the cut. Which essay was that? Wasn't the one you wrote about Metal Gear Solid comparing it to Half-Life? I just read it last minute. When was that?

That sounds great. I'm glad that I wrote that. Anyway, because, like, yeah, there's a real comparison. And, like, we were so used to cut scenes being things you didn't, that were, like, made in a different engine that looked different than the rest of the game. And I remember playing the Metal Gear Solid and just feeling like I'm in this the whole time. It's never, it's never cutting me out of the game. Yeah, I mean, you compare it to Final Fantasy 7, which was, without question, groundbreaking. But you have, like, three different graphical styles, four different graphical styles for the characters, you know, depending on which render farm did the CG cut scene.

And depending on which point of view. you're looking at the characters with. So it was very kind of inconsistent, whereas Metal Gear Solid was consistent all the way through. And the only time you broke away from the character model versions of Solid Snake and everyone is when you went to the Codec and you had these very simply animated character portraits. But those were good too. Yeah, so they were clearly not meant to be. Those were still my favorite versions of the Codex, by the way. Yeah, those were clearly not meant to be like truly representational because they were very sketchy, very hand animated.

But they also gave you like an impression, oh, this is what. Snake really looks like. And it lined up enough with his character model that it was really easy to make that sort of... I would also argue that the Shinkawa art is so beautiful and attractive that we now associate that with Metal Gear. When we see that Shincawa art, it speaks Metal Gear to us. And even though that wasn't the art in the original

two games for 8-bit, like, I remember as soon as I saw that, characters, I really spoke to me. It reminded me a little bit of yours Takamano, but cleaner, you know? Yeah. We're talking about Final Fantasy 7. I think that really bridged the gap in cutscene technology, because with that, it was hardly ever fade to black than cutscene starts. It was always like

transitioning from a still background into full motion video. And that was not as elegant as what Metal Gear did. But I think that was like the next logical step in integrating cutscenes in a more organic way. Well, I think Metal Gear Solid was elegant in a different way than Final Fantasy because Metal Gear Solid did cut to black. Oh, you're right. It did.

You didn't have the seamless transitions. There was no point at which like the camera panned down, like swooped down into the viewpoint as you were playing and all of a sudden a cutscene started. There was always a hard division. And, you know, it really stands out in the jail cell scene when you first meet Merrill and a bunch of soldiers come in and there's like a cut scene and they're like, okay, got to fight. And then it cuts and then the gameplay starts. So, you know, there was a little bit of, you know, you could see the seams. What's missing there is the sound of the CD-ROM drive.

Right, yeah, exactly. But, you know, it was a step forward and it really made an impression. And that led to games like Katman, you know, modern God of War and that sort of thing where, you know, God of War is like one. continuous camera perspective from beginning to end. But that was, that would not have been possible without Metal Gear Solid doing what it did. And not only that, the boss fights were fighting Metal Gear Rex. It was so huge and so overwhelming on the TV screen. I didn't know that consoles could do that at the time.

Well, I mean, and you're getting skipping to the end. Because really, when you look back at this game, I was looking back at it last night and thinking about it. And like, you know, it really is just a bunch of boss fights, really. I mean, like, that's kind of the meat of the meat of the end. this game. And each one kind of is crazier. I disagree. Really? Because like when I think back on this game, like there is the interstitial parts where you're running around doing the still with like getting the keys, all that. But, you know, I think when you really think back to Metal Gear Solid, you remember that first time you fought all of those bosses and what it was like.

I do. But I also remember, you know, like crawling around between, beneath tanks. Let's hear. Yeah. Sneaking around tanks and kind of like slinking against the wall in a furnace and going into the gas filled room and things like that. The first time you see the hind on the helicopter Pat, 5-5-6s and pineapples, and trying to make your way all the way around. That, for me, was a proof of concept of how the game was supposed to work, and it's such an iconic moment because it's so well designed. Yeah, I mean, now that we know how the stealth in the game works and how everything is laid out, it's really easy to breeze through it. But I think we're forgetting that at the time, I think certainly for myself, and I feel like most people, if not everyone, played that game really slowly and spent their time evaluating the environments and trying to figure out, like, Wow, there's, there's, you know, soldiers over there, but I need to get to the passage that's behind them.

How do I do that? And I think back to, you know, that initial – And there's the video cameras, too. Right, that initial landing pad that you were talking about where you kind of come up from the water and you have to get to the other side. And, you know, you use your binoculars and you can look across the viewpoint. That's the only time it really breaks into first-person view. But it does really put you in there. And it's very intimidating.

And at the time, the soldiers seemed really smart because they could follow your foot tracks. Or they could see, like, your breath or whatever, and they chase you around. It's such a game of a system. I think Bob said that earlier. But, like, I remember as I was playing through it, at the beginning, the first half of the game, you are very afraid of everything. You're very worried about getting caught. You're very, you know, like, you're trying to learn, like, how do I engage with these soldiers? How do I fight well?

But then once you get better at the game, remember towards the end, as you realize the systems, you realize the cones of vision, as you realize you can just run around and throw people. Like, as your skill increases, like, the scariness of this game kind of depleted for me. and I was enjoying it more for its systems. And, like, you know, one of the reductionist ways of looking at this game or back at the time was like, oh, you're kind of just playing Pac-Man on that little radar screen, right? And, like, everything else is just a beautiful window dressing, and that is kind of true. But the hardest difficulty level gets rid of the radar.

That's true. Yeah. And I think the ability to go into first-person mode was a big deal at the time that we just sort of take for granted now. Which I never used. Well, you have to, like, the Stinger Missile. There's some big, you know, binoculars. There's reasons to do it. But, like, I think I love it about this game.

When you crawl around in the ducks, you also... But it's cool because you have to be like, oh, they textured every part of this room or they made it so I can look out over the horizon. Like, they had to work around everything you could see in first-person mode. Of course, you can't shoot in first-person mode, not until the bad remake. Well, in Integral, there was a mode you could play in first person. Yeah, you're right. But I think we're getting back to the scene where you see Merrill.

That's kind of like, you know, in the first hour of the game towards the end. It's where the story really kicks in. And I think I remember that scene, the first time I played it, just the fact that you're spying on her, that you're listening to people, that, like, you're on the codec then. And it kind of slowed the game down and you realize that this game was playing with narrative pacing. Already you sat through tons of cutscenes more than any game probably ever. And I think at that point I included, and this is not a normal kind of video game. It's more like living through a spy movie where you have all this agency inside of this world and there's all the stuff to go do that's really not that important.

And then you quickly find out what the thing you're supposed to do is to move the story forward. But all that space that Kojima creates for you to mess around and have fun and look for little hidden things and talk to people. That's a trademark. And that was very new. And I think what we think about his directorial style is really crystallized in this game. You can see whose point of view is going to be, you know, like take his original game, remake it with beautiful, beautiful visual and aesthetics, but also like, you know, this tapestry of geopolitical intrigue that you may or may not have understood at the time when you first played this game 20 years ago. You know, I think it set the tone for what he's doing still today. Yeah, you know, one thing I do want to say, just kind of going back to talking about the presentation and the character design.

One thing I really feel like has never been captured is the sort of like the sketchiness of the character models because, you know, the faces were textured but they weren't animated. And that doesn't seem like it should work, but it did because of the low resolution. And also because of the sketchiness of the Shinkawa artwork, the sort of represented the characters in the packaging and also, you know, in the codec. And that was something that I feel, you know, it got kind of just throughout the uncanny valley. There was no impression that these were real people, but they were close enough. They were convincing enough that you cared and you could believe that they were talking. And at the same time, it didn't take you out of the game because they didn't look almost right. I mean, they were clearly not almost realistic.

Yeah, well, they were very clever about it in that there were never any extended close-ups of a face talking. And most of the talking was done through codec with more realistic faces. But it's funny that that still doesn't bother me. Like, I think Dark Souls 3 doesn't have lip sync on any of the characters. And that was the same time when Uncharted 4 was coming out and thinking like, oh, my God, this face technology, it's so brilliant. And it's like, one game is just like, oh, we don't need Lipsank, who cares? So it's a different philosophy. Maybe it's a more Japanese philosophy.

When I do go back to the original Middle Gear Solid, though, I do get thrown by the fact that they don't really have mouths and they aren't moving. The heads are just kind of like floppy. Well, this was before motion capture, too. So everything was hand animated. So it's more, I feel more expressive in a, like, in a sort of cohesive. way. It doesn't have, again, the uncanny valley of the, like, I don't know if you guys remember

Virtua Fighter, what was it called? Virtua Quest. Oh, God. Where it was like, they used motion capture on these cartoon character, and it was like everyone in the game was a Disney person, you know, you see a Disneyland and a costume. It did not work for me.

Well, and you know, with Middleger Salt, there was before we had photorealistic 3D models. And I remember at the time, it being, oh, these look good and interesting, but now they do look a bit like dolls or something. It is strange. You really can't go back completely on it. But I think an overall thing, but the visuals, this game had a very low color palette.

And at the time, I remember the first time I saw it, I was like, oh man, that game looks neat and weird. And the animation looked really good. And, you know, does it run in high-res mode? Maybe it doesn't. No, it doesn't. But like, something about the way they made the graphics look with the color palette gives it this really

unique, interesting look that, like, as soon as you saw it, like, even though it had this weird color palette, I thought it looked fantastic. Well, they They basically, what Kojima basically did was use chroma key, which would be sort of pioneered a year later in the Matrix and then would become a standard use, like a fixture in Hollywood where every scene is color corrected and kind of shifted. But you didn't really see that before that. Right.

And so he was like using this extremely pioneering cinematic technique within the game. But every area kind of gives you a different impression. Like sometimes it's a cool blue, sometimes it's sort of a sickly green. Right. You get to the furnace and it's very warm. warm. When you get to the final hangar with Metal Gear Rex, it's very gray. I guess it was just for a filmic presentation.

You're right. You can really approach this in a way that, you know, we weren't used to seeing any games. And also, you know, the PlayStation had very limited texture memory. So taking this approach by using a low color palette, it creates a greater impression of detail because you can use more sophisticated shades within the palates. I don't know. I feel like it was a very smart choice to work within the limitations of the machine. but also very sort of innovative and it really shows that, yes,

Kojima is a big movie nerd and he was paying attention to, you know, things that people were starting to do with digital processing and technology in movies and saying, well, this medium I'm working in to create my fake movie is by nature digital so I can do this stuff and I can, I can, you know, make use of these techniques that are very advanced in Hollywood. So, you know, I think that's a way in which Metal Gear really benefited from Kojima's, cinema nerd tendencies and it's maybe a more subtle one that people don't necessarily think about

in light of all the obvious movie references. But, yeah, I appreciate the fact that Metal Gear Solid is, you know, it's kind of like a movie, it's kind of like a spy novel, it's kind of like a comic book, it's a whole lot of things all at once and it all kind of

just gets blended together and because it's a video game, it all holds together. So looking at the note of the notes here, we've just been kind of free rambling here, We talked a little bit about the fact that, you know, this was not the first Metal Gear game. There was Metal Gear and then Metal Gear 2, the second of which did not come to the U.S. So I feel like Metal Gear Solid probably had a different impact on American gamers and European gamers than it did Japanese gamers who at least, you know, Middle Gear Solid or Metal Gear 2 was not a huge game over there. It came out at the end of the MSX's lifespan and that series wasn't super popular over there.

but at least people had sort of the context for it, whereas we did not. And this game is basically a remake of Metal Gear 2. It's funny, because I played it afterwards, same with you. I was like, oh, wait, a lot of those things we thought were super amazing, innovative, never before done narrative gameplay things in Metal Gear Solid were actually

just done in Metal Gear Solid 2 and he brought them back right in the next game. Like, hey, remember this thing I did like a few years ago? He didn't replace Metal Gear 2. Metal Gear 2 was still canon. It was just, he did it again in Metal Gear Solid. It's kind of like what Nintendo did with Metroid Prime and with Ocarina of Time, where they looked to the previous entry in the series and said, that worked really well. We pretty much perfected the structure and flow and mechanics of the game. How do we make that work in the third dimension?

And that was usually how people made successful transitions to 3D in the 90s with these legacy franchises was don't throw out everything that's come before, make use of it. And I don't know if any series was quite so faithful, by which I mean, like, just straight up duplicated the previous game as Metal Gear. Metal Gear Solid is Metal Gear 2 with a fresh coat of very nice, cool, color corrected paint. The thing that I find really funny is that Metal Gear 2 was a direct result of Snake's Revenge, right? Previously, he had kind of been like, well, I did Metal Gear. That was good. I'm, like, leaving well enough alone. So if not for Snake's Revenge, we probably wouldn't have gotten Metal Gear Solid.

Think about that. That's true. Well, and I think, you know, I don't... Thank you, Snakes Revenge isn't a bad game. Yeah, it's just weird. But I don't fault him because, like, imagine he had all these great ideas. He made this great game that didn't ever come out in the West and probably had a limited install base in Japan. Metal Gear 2 was a great game.

One of the best eight big games ever. They were tackling 3D polygonal games and, like, why not take all these great ideas that almost nobody got to see and use them again? Yeah, I mean, when you play Metal Gear 2, it's hard to think. This ran on the same hardware that, you know, it's hardware that. actually couldn't play an effective vision of Grades. That's exactly what I was going to say. Was it MSX-2? It was scrolling.

It had scrolling, but it was still kind of like bad. Not very good. Okay. And Metal Gear II doesn't really scroll that much, so it's fine. If you go back to the original Metal Gear, Jeremy, you and I wrote about this on U.S. Gamer, you could feel him straining against the bounds of what was possible at that time. Like when you fight the hind, you could tell that in his mind, there is this massive, amazing set piece where you're fighting a hind, but all he could do is basically have a little static thing

with a little turret, does shooting at you. And he was thinking up to Metal Gear Solid, even in the late 80s. He was wanting to make that game then, and he couldn't. And finally, he was able to. And technology so often, like, designers go completely nuts once they have technology and not always for the good. For him, it was liberating. Right. And his approach to a solution for creating a sense. cinematic game, a story-driven game, before PlayStation technology existed, was to just go straight away from action and go to adventure game, just a game all about talking and, you know, taking the time to explore details and, you know, really focusing on story and text.

Well, he wanted to make a movie. And that was the only way that he could conceivably at that time was to basically do adventure games, and then finally he was able to make the movie he wanted to. He wanted to make other people's movies, Kat. Yeah, okay, fair enough. I kid because I love police knots and snatcher. Yeah, they are very derivative, but that's okay because most games at the time, that was actually a really kind of a big thing in Japanese games at the time was like, we saw this thing in a movie from America and it was really cool. Let's do that as a video game.

Put Ripley and Arnold Schwarzenegger in your game now. I miss when theft could be that brazen. I think like deadly premonition, which I also love is the last real case of that. It's such a love letter. But, you know, it's funny. I was reading that Shinkava was instructed to make solace. Solid Snake look a bit like Jean-Claude Van Damme meets Christopher Walken in Metal Gear Solid, which I can kind of see. If you look at the facial structure, totally is Christopher Walker.

And that's a good combination. Wasn't Christopher Walken and Deer Hunter? He was. I mean, Vietnam vet. I mean, he was kind of a soldier. I would not put those two characters together, but, and okay, sure. But, you know, as someone who hasn't really played much of police knots, like I've poked around Gillian, or not a Jillian. What's his name?

Mel Gibson. Yes, Mel Gibson. What is his name? I've also only paid part of it. I played through the whole thing, but it was like five years ago. Yeah, I like, I started to play through the translation recently. And when you read the stuff in his office, you're like, wow, this game's really dark. And I can't deal with this right now.

But, you know, having played most of Snatcher and just a little bit of police nuts, I don't feel like I can really say much about what Middle Gear Solid owes to those games. But, you know, for you guys who have spent more time with those games, I'm curious to hear your perspective. Like, what part of those are, in what way are those games sort of the linchpin between Metal Gear 2 and Metal Gear Solid? I think it's that Kojima or, you know, people that work with him are just dying to explain things about the world they created. So in Police Knots, if you look at, like, the e-cigarette, it'll tell you, like, the history of smoking in the future and why people don't smoke anymore and why you can't smoke in space colonies and things like that. So I think explaining away the video game bullshit with this faux science. is something that they really love to do.

And those explanations are baked in the metal gear and the Kodak conversations. When you get a new weapon or whenever you fight a boss, you get the entire bio, you get information. He just loves to pack that into his games, just like the lore and world building. Yeah, I was going to say world building and like minutiaa and just like the depth of explanation. And like in every little area, there's tons of things to look at, to use, to talk to. But those games had a phone where you could call lots of people already. You know, like, I think Coach was obsessed with information and communication and you saw the little teases of the broader stroke stuff more in police knots about like getting to big issues. And, you know, Metal Gear Solid grapples with very heavy political issues about disarmament and stuff.

You know, it's, I remember at the time you're like, wow, I think most of the consumers weren't ready for this journey. And of course, by the time you get to Meliger Solid 2 and 3, you know, he's taking people for rides they never thought they'd be going on. But it's there in Meliger Solid, especially at the end. It turns to the full motion video at the end. You know, it's not just all dietic, as we talked about earlier. I was going to say, I have less experience with these games than these two, but police nots really revealed Kojima's love of Japanese sci-fi. And whenever I think of police nots, I always think of like Pat Labor and that kind of thing. And I think Pat Labor, which is an anime that's set in near future Japan where police officers are using like mecks and that kind of thing, really kind of fits all.

a lot with what he was doing with Metal Gear Solid, which was you have a near future setting that's extremely realistic. But, oh, look, there's a giant walking meck. Why? Because it's cool. Not just a walking meck, but one that roars like a dinosaur. Why? Because why not?

It looks like one. It might as well sound like one, right? That makes sense. And I think part of the appeal for Metal Gear Solid for me was the Foxhound group being this crazy group of interestingly named, creatively designed, wacky bosses kind of out of like a kung fu film. kind of, you know, like a little bit, yeah, or like Kill Bill or something. I think it's like a lot like the running man. I think the running man secretly invented the idea of these kind of boss fights.

I don't even think it's secret because there's, you know. That's true. Yes, exactly. In Metal Gear 2, there's, what's the guy's name? The Fat Man? No, not Metal Gear Solid 2, Metal Gear 2. One of the bosses, his name is like taken straight from the run. Awesome, yeah.

Watch the Running Man. It's a series of boss fights. It's awesome. You're right, actually. Yeah, so I agree, and I think that Metal Gear Solid definitely shows him sort of fumbling with how to integrate all this information into the game, and it's not always elegant. I mean, you know, you kind of get a taste of it early on when Natasha Romanenko calls you to tell you at length about nuclear proliferation and, you know, materials unaccounted for muff and all that stuff. like, it just kind of kills the game dead. Like, it kills the momentum right before the boss fight with the tank.

Or maybe it's after. But, you know, then that happens again much more egregiously at the very end where you have like five minutes of boss fight and escape from the base. But it takes about 40 minutes to get through it because Liquid Snake has to tell you all about the son's a big boss. Let me tell you, Snake, about gene therapy. Levant terribles. Leon von Terrible.

Terrib, the sons up. Are they, what is it? The terrible children. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, he just goes on and on and you're like, oh, okay, I just want to punch you and go. And there's also, you know, one or two, too many double-crossing secret entities. I'm actually this person.

Well, that's more Metal Gear Solid, too. There's more than, there's some of that in here. Yeah, DARPA Chief. And some of it's been retconned in. Like, the DARPA Chief was not, what's his face? Decoy Octopus. Oh, yeah, well, there's that. But, I mean, no, the DARPA Chief turned out.

to be, what's his face for Metal Gear Solid 3, they're a support guy? Oh, you're Master Miller. No. No, he was a patriot agent. Yes, Matt, uh, yeah, he had a name. Sagan, the guy, Siggins. Yeah, Siggint. Yeah, right.

And Liquid who was masquerading as Mr. Miller. I always thought that one of like the one of the moments that stands out to me in Metal Gear Solid that I thought was cheesy even 1998 was when, uh, gray fox is about to die. He's been, he's trapped under the foot of Metal Gear Rex and he's still talking about. about the philosophy of soldiers. We're not tools of the government. When he shows up there. And the Middle Gear Rex is just standing there. It's like, okay, finish your monologue.

All right, now I'll kill you. I thought it was great when he showed up, but then, yeah, he went on too long. Right. But, I mean, the idea there is kind of like something you saw in Metal Gear Solid 3 again, where you have to pull the trigger on someone who's a friend. And if you try, like, the entire time you view this scene through the Stinger reticle. So the idea is, like, you can end the fight right now if you just blow. them away. But if you try to pull the trigger, snakes like, I can't do it. I can't do it.

So it's kind of an interesting sort of, you see an interesting follow-up to that in Middle Gear Solid 3 where you have to kill boss, like you don't have a choice. But in this one, it's more about like, you know, as much as snake is the battle-hardened, you know, mercenary who doesn't care about anyone, he can't bring himself to kill Gray Fox. So there is some humanity to him. So, you know, I feel like a lot of the sort of ridiculous stuff that happens in this game happens for narrative reasons or for character development reasons. And there is that kind of element, I think, in Japanese storytelling a bit where you just sort of have to go with it because it doesn't necessarily follow logically, but it's right for the story. And it gets

across a point that the author is trying to tell. And Kojima is not afraid to lean into that. As much as he loves western movies, Hollywood, he's still, you know, has it internalized that, I think, that Japanese approach to storytelling. I was going to say, he's a huge Mecca fan, and in Mecca, there's, it's nothing more Mecca than two pilots fighting one another and explaining their personal philosophies. Well, it's like flashing back and forth to the cockpit. He's like, why are you talking on the freaking radio with one another man? Well, it's funny, because I think, you know, the characters of Solid Snake and Otakan

are kind of two aspects of Kojima, and, like, Odecon is like this brazen, like, laid bear fanboy part of him. Yeah. That's true. And it kind of takes on a darker twist now. Much dark. He has all very. You look back and you're like, oh. Like the fact that he, Odecon is crushing on Greyfox, and you're like, ew, gross, seriously. A Greyfox?

Oh, not Greyfox. I was like, man, what did I miss? Okay. Okay, like, secret fanfic reveal. Oh, you read my story on Fanfic, Nick. Can you, can you please like and subscribe? Okay, he's very sad when you kill Snowber Wolf. I kind of forgot about it. Yeah. Oh. Thank you.

So, you know, we were talking during our bathroom break, not that we were in the bathroom, but Shane made the point that what most people think of when they think of Metal Gear, the first thing they think of is Psychomantus. I disagree. Oh, I, I, what is the first thing you think of, Bob, when you think of Metal Gear Solid? Actually, I would agree with Psycho Mantis. Okay. Putting your control on the floor and having it vibrate, you must have a hardwood floor, though. The battle with the hindie. Interesting.

It's a good one. Yeah. But that was in Metal Gear. That's just a big rip off. Yeah, but I had never experienced a moment in a console game up to that point where I was when I was pasted against the wall and the hindie was flying overhead behind me. And it was such a memorable moment for me. It felt like I was right there.

I had never had that before and it still sticks with me today. Interesting. So the first thing I always think of is that scene when you meet the arms tech president, or no, the DARPA chief in the prison cell, and you're talking to him and then all of a sudden he dies, like just out of nowhere. Fox die. Because that's pretty much how the demo ends. And the demo disc is what really sold me on this game. I'm so glad that the demo disc came out because, one, it made my interest in the game go from like, yeah, I want to play this to, I need to play this now immediately. but also because I got to play

the first like 20, 30 minutes of the game when the actual game came out like a month later, I didn't jump immediately into the game. What I did was because I had already played a bit of it, I was like, I'm going to look at all this other stuff that's here. I'm going to look at the VR missions. I'm going to look at the mission logs.

I'm going to look at the briefing where a solid snake is in a prison cell talking to the mission commander. So I went into the game, like the final game, actually really well, prepared for the story ahead. And I feel like it really put me in sort of the spirit of the thing. It was a funny thing is that I didn't play the demo. The first time I ever played Metal Gear Solid, somebody had just kind of lent it to me. And I remember going into the first room and not

knowing what was going on or what I was supposed to be doing and getting bored and quitting immediately. Wow. Okay. And I don't know why I, and then sometime later, I don't know why I bought it, even though, like, this game in the first room had bored me in. confused me. And then having purchased it, I decided to maybe invest a little more time and get out of the first room. And then when I saw the helicopter pad and was when I was looking around with the binoculars and I was sneaking around, that's when the game clicked for me. But you get that cool title card then when you go up the elevator? Yeah, no, exactly. That's that whole movie thing going on. So of the three stealth games that launched in fall 1998,

which do you think was most successful? There was this, there was Tensu, and there was Thief the Dark Project. That was definitely Metal Gear Solid. I mean, Thief the Dark Project is certainly an iconic series by one of the greatest designers ever and Warren Specter. But at the same time, I feel like it's a little more of a cult favorite these days, whereas Metal Gear Solid kicked off one of the four or five biggest game series of all time. Interesting. What about you guys? I think Tentry's kind of overrated.

I'm sorry. It is. It was a mess. It's a mess of a game with some cool ideas. and a good soundtrack, but it's very inelegant. I'll say that, and they never really figured it out after that. I will say this about Thief. They did some things with stealth that were really cool.

I would say maybe it might be from a pure mechanical gameplay perspective, a better game than Metal Gear Solid. Well, certainly the enemy AI is a lot smarter in Thief. Whereas Metal Gear Solid, it's pretty bad. They do things with sound, for example. like sound is extremely critical in a Thief the Dark Project. And I don't, I think there's, there are elements of sound and Metal Gear Solid, but Thief does more with it. There are, yeah, tapping the wall.

You can tap the wall, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think on a computer you could assume people were going to have, like if they could play Thief, they were going to have a pretty nice rig. Whereas Middle Gear Solid is like, they actually had to take into account the fact that some people might have a mono seaguer. Like there's a, you know, one of those fourth wall breaking conversation. with a colonel who's like, well, if you have stereo, you can do this. But if you don't, you'll have to make the best of it. Something along those lines. I can't remember exactly.

It was like when you're fighting for psychomantus maybe? I can't remember. I'm kind of in agreement that Tensu overrated. I mean, it was good, but, you know, better than Ninja. And thief is great. Ninja wasn't even a stealth game, though. Thief is great, but it's its own thing. It's totally different.

I think, you know, Medegro-Sold was, you know, a landmark title changed the entire perception of what a AAA game is supposed to be and what a creator-driven game should be. So in my mind, there's no comparison. I think O'Green of Time is the only other game that year or Half-Life that is in the same running. Yeah. And Pokemon. Thief was certainly critically acclaimed. And a lot of people talked about how it redefined stealth as we knew it.

But it also, I remember always hearing about how it did not sell nearly enough. And that was a criminal thing. Whereas Metal Gear Solid just felt, well, I mean enormous. I mean, IGN named it the best PlayStation game. And I'm kind of in agreement with them. Yeah, I mean, Metal Gear Solid was good at taking the stealth concept and making it sort of giving it populist appeal. It made it simple enough and accessible enough that it didn't feel punishing. Both Thief and Tenshu feel very, like if you don't do things just right, you feel like the game is, you know, scolding you like a redhead step child.

And Metal Gear Solid doesn't really have that. It's very forgiving. And it plays around with the death mechanics. You know, every time you die, you get a different snake, snake. Or, like, sometimes May Ling calls in, and she's like, Snake, snake, are you there? Have you ever played the mode in MetalGar Solid Integral, which was the re-release in Japan? There's a mode that has infinite machine gun that's, like, super easy mode where you just have, like, an infinite fire machine gun. You can get that, you can get that in the American version, too.

Like, depending on which ending you get, there is permanent stealth camouflage or infinite ammo. You can just start that. There's even a reference to that in Metal Gear Solid, too. How could you forget? You know, he ties the bandana, he's like, infinite ammo, or whatever. I think Metal Gear Solid versus Thief reflects the very different perspectives of where games were at the time on console and PC. On console, Metal Gear Solid was still basically an overhead game. It was not actually that different from the original Metal Gear, whereas Thief was pushing first-person games really far.

First person was such a thing in the late 90s, and it would be another few years before first-person games truly broke out on console as well. I kind of feel like Thief is what Wolfenstein 3D should have been. Because, you know, the original Castle Wolfenstein was a stealth game. It was one of the very first stealth games. And Wolfenstein 3D didn't do that so much. It was just like, go shoot Hitler and everything between you and Hitler, which is cool. Like, I'm into that. But it definitely kind of stepped away from the concept.

And I feel like with Thief, they really said, wait, let's go back to that sort of original concept of sneaking around and not being indestructible, of being very vulnerable. I find it fascinating that they came out the same year and were developed independently of one another. It's just an odd coincidence. I mean, that happens a lot. Look at Deep Impact in Armageddon. My God.

I guess it just... That was somebody stealing company secrets and taking them elsewhere. I'm kidding. I think it was just reflective of how game design was growing so rapidly at that time where we had moved beyond the concept of just running around mindlessly shooting things.

We wanted something deeper and stealth was a natural next step. And so many people did it poorly after this. So poorly. Still doing it now poorly, to be honest. I mean, O'Rean of Time had a stealth segment, and that sucked. Oh, that was so easy, though. It was simple and short, but it was still annoying.

I've kind of really resent stealth sections in games because it feels like a complete waste of time, whereas in the original Metal Gear Solid, I was like, oh, my God, it's like hide and seek, and I have to just kind of stay in the shadows. This is so tense. A game needs to prop up that element if it's... wants to include it. And most games don't. It's just like, well, here's the part where everything's different and you'll fail if you, you know, don't make proper use of these new mechanics. I think the er example of a stealth scene in the game is the Incredible Hulk

where you were Bruce Banner and you were doing useless stealth sections. You were like, I just want to be the Hulk, man. Or Casillvania Lords of Shadow 2. Oh, yeah. Were you the rats? I remember your review. I remember your review. I wasn't happy. Actually, did you review it? I didn't review. No, that was a preview. That's right. It was a preview. Yes, let's bring that back up again. Well, that game has gone on to become loved and remembered by everybody, right? Yes, it's a classic. Having dabbled in that side digression for a while, let's go on to another side digression and bring up the listener mail.

This time we can talk about stuff you guys want to talk about because that's right. You read Retronuts.com and you read our Twitter feed, and you saw that we had a call for listener mail opinions about Metal Gear Solid. So here we go. We're going to take turns reading stuff from the site and from email. So without further ado Having It's impressive how well The game holds up mechanically

Even as its sequel Advanceed its overall design over time The development team did a fantastic job Making a small world feel large and scale With clever design while treating players to plenty of world, I think it means minute world details. Footprints in the snow, cold breath,

snake catching a cold, even the reverberating audio that makes the atmosphere feel appropriately cold and hollow. I love how much the storytelling is restrained in retrospect. I don't know about that. The dark, dare I say, thoughtful plot feels in sync with that atmosphere

and it makes for a gritty experience. It strikes all the right balance in the end. Even its soundtrack consists of moody melodies that enhance the intense dual boss theme. And in some mostly great performances from a great cast, still haters' best read of Snake. This is still Kojima's best action movie. Thank you all for a great show.

And remember, you've been talking to me, dear retronauts, Gustavo Lazo. Okay. That's a good ending for the email. It's memorable for sure. Yeah. I want to read this one. It's from Robert L. Alger, and he reminds us that he remembers that he remembers playing the crap out of the Pizza Hut demo disc

that had the first bit of Metal Gear Salt on it. I didn't realize there was a 10th Pizza Hut. And I just remember that. In addition to being on, like, PlayStation Underground, there was a Pizza Hut demo disc that you got. If you ordered like a pizza, and I think that's also helped, you know, spread the word about this game. Future Metal Gear sponsor, right, Pizza Hut. Have we done a retronauts about demo discs because that was such a great topic? That was such an integral part of the late 90s.

Yeah, but I think you're right. This demo, which, you know, you know, had you waiting for the elevator, doing some slow sequences, picking up some items, getting some chaff grenades. Like, you know, it gave you a taste of the game just enough to get you into the systems. and then you're done. Yeah. So anyway, the letter. That was the entire idea of his letter. Oh, was it?

It was more of just like a hot comment that reminded me pizza hike. I did not know about that, but it sounds like it was pretty much the same as the PlayStation Underground. Same content, but on top of a pizza. You cannot hide in that box. Nope. It's too flat. Somebody that doesn't like Metal Gear wrote in to troll us, it seems. So Bands Sell says, how do I fix what is wrong with me?

I just don't get the Metal Gear Solid series. My first experience was jealousy when Metal Gear Saw launched in Europe, and all I had was N64. I remember someone telling me, quote, it's so much better than Golden Eye because it's so realistic, unquote. Another friend did a second playthrough, just to make a VHS tape of the cutscene so he could watch them like a movie. I remember kids in a game store whispering to each other, have you heard? Snake dies at the end. And all of this was before I knew about the fourth wall breaking stuff with Psycho Mantis, which is a concept I love. I was excited for Twin Snakes on the GameCube but after playing up to the first boss

I gave up because of the bad writing and gameplay and I'm going to say editor's note I gave up because of Dennis Dyak All I could see was a boring overwritten game So I downloaded the PS1 Classic for my PSP when that service launched To give it another chance I gave up at about the same place as Twin Snakes

Seriously now what am I missing here This wasn't my last try with the series I tried to like MSG 3 MGS 3 I like MSG is great It's really tasty MGS 3 on PS2 and 3DS. God, when the Vita version of MGS 2 and 3 were on PS Plus, I try it again.

I can sincerely say that I am not trolling here. These games have never given me a moment's pleasure. What is the trick to liking this series? I still have Metal Gear Solid 3 and Peace Walker and my digital backlog. Don't ask. If someone can teach me how to like them, I'd be grateful. My response is play Metal Gear Solid 5. It's all of the stuff for Metal Gear with more modern mechanics that might be more suited to your brain.

I mean, my response is just accept that maybe the... the series isn't for you, and that's fine. Not everyone has to like every game. You should still play Metal Gear Solid 5, though. My response is user error. I mean, this kid sounds smart, but he sounds like he thinks this game is, you know, up and e and too smart for its own good or, you know, reaching beyond its means or like Kojima's guilty of hubris.

I think there's an opinion out there that, oh, these are just gobbledy good. You can't understand it. And it's wrong. And I think if you look at them in the context of when they came out and try to appreciate them for what they are and, you know, maybe don't expect some, like, you know, grand unification of your life after you play this game. It didn't help that they started with Twin Snakes. Yeah, Twin Snakes is broken.

I mean, we're all talking kind of memorably about how we're like, oh, man, it was so groundbreaking in 1998. Well, by the time Twin Snakes came out, you know, games had caught up with Metal Gear Solid to a great extent. And Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 and 4, I guess, where it kept pushing the boundaries ever further. But if you, like, started with Twin Snakes and it left a bad taste in your mouth, like, I could totally see. see why you would have maybe a perspective on the series. We're like, I don't get the hype. Also, one of the reasons this game is pretty popular in Western Europe is upon its initial release, it was dubbed into like French and German and Italian.

So, you know, that was pretty rare at the time for it, not only for a game to have this much dialogue, but for it to get a full localization with voice. This is from Cormacour. A lot's been made of MGS's cinematic presentation and effects on the presentation and storytelling in the games. Rightfully so. Lest has been written of its gameplay innovations. I don't know about that, but this is editor's note. know about that. I certainly write about them a lot.

The boss fights were innovative and exciting. Sniper Wolves fight only bettered by MGS3 is the end. And neat gimmicks like the cardboard box and putting the codec frequency on the back of the game's box show that Kojima is more than just 70% made of movies. Thoughts. You know, the look outside the game

for information thing was also Metal Gear 2. It was one of the many things in Metal Gear Solid that Metal Gear 2 first did. But that kind of gets to that point where, you know, I was talking about how people who didn't live in Japan, hadn't imported Metal Gear 2, had no idea all this stuff happened. So it was kind of recycling those ideas.

I didn't know about the codec frequency on the back of the box thing until like much later. And I was like, oh, that's really brilliant. But I think they make a good point in that we were comparing Metal Gear Solid to Final Fantasy earlier. And I love Final Fantasy, but so much of it is characters talking in a very static kind of way. And whereas Metal Gear also has a lot of static cutscenes where we're, people are talking to one another. It also really understands the values of using its systems to advance

the narrative in so many different and interesting ways. Even things like when Snake is looking through the stinger and you're trying to press the fire button and he's going, I can't do it. That's an example of using the game's mechanics to advance the narrative and Kojima was really

ahead of his time in that regard. So from Lin Nung, I was pitched on Middle Gear Solid by my cousin as movie as a game, while visiting relatives and the cat skills during a holiday. We proceeded to blast through the majority of it in the course of two days. The voice acting, the humor, the gameplay options, which were revolutionary in its day, and Kojima's team's attention to detail were all things I loved. From the moment Snake arrives on Shadow Moses to the last face-off fist fight atop rex

and the drive to the entrance as liquid is trying to ram you off the road, I thought this is what video games could be. No one at this point had a tight narrative mixed with great gameplay, and I think it's still the standard bearer. You know, I think we should also take a moment to give a shout out to Jeremy Blousteen's localization for the game. Excellent localization. Because, in my opinion, none of the subsequent Metal Gear games were localized as well. Like, you know, Kojima had a much bigger hand in the localization of future games and was like, no, no, this is what I intended.

Even though he's not working in his native language when he's bringing it to English. So he has like these ideas that, you know, I'm not, you know, criticizing him. him for having the ideas, but localization is a process, and it's really important to get someone who is a native speaker in there to say, hey, this sounds natural and elegant. And, you know, the original Metal Gear Solid, the script for it, I think, makes the best of some kind of goofy ideas and concepts and names. And it kind of pitches the whole thing as an over-the-top comic book. And future games didn't really have that sort of self-awareness and that sort of cheekiness. So I think, you know, between the quality of the localization writing, on top of the original story script, combined with the great voice acting, really makes Metal Gear Saw, to me, the most enjoyable game to experience as a story, even though you do have, you know, Liquid Snake talking about Les Avant Terre for 20 minutes or whatever.

Like, that's dull, but everyone still makes the best of it. And even though there's some localization choices that afterwards you're kind of say, oh, maybe I wouldn't have May Ling who was born in Berkeley speak in a Chinese accent. Well, but at the same time, Jeremy Blasstein added, like, in the Japanese version, all of her quotes were ancient Chinese proverbs. And instead, he added lots of other references. Oh, yeah, like Shakespeare and the Westerners would enjoy. Yeah. Like he, I mean, that was the voice director, I think Chris Zimmerman, the voice cast producer. That wasn't Blaustein's choice with the accent.

But, you know, I think they were, even that was trying to say like, hey, here's this international team of people. And I think the voice casting director dismissed the fact that, oh, she's an American. Well, if you want to go deep, there are multiple podcast appearances by Jeremy talking about the experience of what the changes they made. So if you're a Metal Gear fan, definitely that's worth a listen. Yeah, he's not been shy about talking about it. But it's a great localization and really just kind of pushes the game over the top and makes it just that. much better than anything that had been produced at the time. Talking about the voice acting really

quickly, we have to remember that voice acting was still extremely new, especially in console games. And generally non-professionals. And while there's a certain hamminess to the voice acting in Metal Gear Solid, as with all games of that era, it still holds up

really well. It's not nearly as cheesy as a lot of the stuff that you'll see at the time. I agree. Very well directed. I mean, a lot of people say that that was David Hayter's best performance. He was magnificently well cast. I'm curious, was Liquid Ocelot always supposed to be from, like, South Africa?

Was that always supposed to be his accent? Or did that become retconned because of his English localization? Good question. I have no idea. Couldn't tell you. A little bit of a deep cut of Metal Gear lore here for you. But yeah, like the David Hader

gravely voiced cynical protagonist, that wasn't really a thing. And that's kind of become... Like a meme, right? Not just a meme. Like, you just hear that everywhere. Like every video game male protagonist is trying to be David Hater. And you see the movies too. The DeusX guy.

The DeusX guy. And if you think about how it differs from your typical Japanese protagonist, right? I mean, Kojima, in addition to really liking Mecca, has a big thing for, like, you know, kind of the soft gun military kind of culture that you see in Japan from time to time. And David, Solid Snake really fits into that kind of mold as opposed to, I don't know, cloud. Right? Right. I don't know. It's pretty dark in Kingdom Heart.

He's got one black wing. Gosh. Let me read another comment here. This is from Nick Fugate. MetalGar Solid was a sort of game that really made an impression on me from the start. It was so cinematic and interesting, and I had friends that didn't have a PlayStation

who would just come over to watch me play through it. I loved how the game world seemed like a real place where you could decide how you would interact with the guards and how you would proceed. While some of this feeling of freedom was an illusion, I really did feel like I had a lot more options while playing this game than any other previous game. The bosses were so memorable,

I would often reload my old saves to play the fights over and over. And I totally agree with that. Like I was saying earlier, like, early on in this game, I felt like I had all this new agency because in the old 8-bit games, you were just being pushed from left to right

or on a top-down thing. Like, it didn't feel like there were things to do that you weren't supposed to do where things you could discover. And like throughout Metal Gear, I always felt like, hey, if I wanted to, I could go see what's under this thing or climb up this and call up this person

on my codec. I loved it. And the boss fights, again, like, for me, that was the real meat of this game, I would probably reload all of those fights over and over again and show them, my friends. How many people did you show the Psychomantus

Battle too? Come on. I dragged my dad into the room to make him watch me play the Metal Gear Rex fight because I was like, look at this. This is incredible. Exactly. Yeah. So Blair Farrell says, I first experienced Metal Gear Solid in 1999 when my brother got a PlayStation that year for Christmas and

Metal Gear Solid along with it. Having only an N64 in that generation up to that point, Metal Gear Solid was a mind-expanding experience. Like everyone, I was creeped out when Psychomantus moved my controller with his mind. I was 15. In Florida, when I had to change controller ports to trick him. What made Metal Gear Salt such a special

game for me was that it made me think about the medium of video games like I never had before. Coming off the N64's library, which Save Zelda was mostly bright, colorful platformers, here was a game that was trying to blend the medium of films and video games. Its presentation is hilariously outdated now. I disagree.

But something as simple as the opening sequence where Snake is sneaking around the warehouse while credits are on screen was a far cry from Babon Battlefield and Mumbo Mountain. until that point I was staunchly a Nintendo fan never considering what else was out there I wasn't after Christmas 99 and I have to say that like thinking about the blending

of film and video games that that had been happening since like the early 90s but the idea was always like let's put real people in this or something like that like FMB games yeah or even Resident Evil 1 where it's like the intro and endings have real people but those real people never show up throughout the entire game but it was a quote unquote cinematic game

Willis in Apocalypse. Something like the dig, for example, would have been a quote-unquote cinematic game when it came out. Or loom, even. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you look at Ocarina of Time and you look, it does have cutscenes, but what do they do? They just give you like 20 seconds of context for the story without any dialogue, you know, like baby link escaping from the castle and Gannon looking down at him on a horse. And that's about as dramatic as cutscenes, you know, in-engine cutscenes got at that point. I'm thinking of all of the bad CD-ROM games from the 90s where it's like, oh, Dennis Hopper.

in this game and Christopher Walken's in this game just all of those Silo Wood games Ripper alone Ripper is fucking three quick comments about Psycho Mantis

A as soon as I saw all the characters the one that was floating and had a gas mask on was my favorite and like I always go for the surreal for the you know

phantasmagorical the supernatural and really there's no explanation for why Psychomantis is as fucked up and crazy in this game as it is and that's what's so great

about it really you know also you read your memory card in the Japanese version if you'd played snatcher or police nots for PlayStation 1, you got a special message with a voice message from Kojima, like thanking you for supporting his titles, which is awesome. I had no idea about that until I was doing the research.

And I was like, oh, my God, the Cyclomantus thing was so much more elaborate and in-depth. And so many games, like Tokumaki Memorial had to be cut out because it was like, this game certainly never came out in the U.S. Exactly. And also for the much later Windows release published by Microsoft, they had to redo the entire psycho manna's thing. And I think the way to beat him is like some codec frequency you type with your keyboard or something. I never played it. My favorite villain was always sniper wolf because A, she was a woman and B, because I hadn't, the sniper battle was really, it was unique.

I was stressed out by all that dies of Pam. Yeah. I don't, I don't think that you had to like take a calming agent to drugging yourself to yourself. It also reflected how, you know, that was the fight that made me realize how connected it made me feel like Shadow Moses was a real place because I don't think the backtracking is great go all the way back

to get a sniper rifle so you could come all the way back while Merrill is laying there I believe bleeding out on the snow okay but the actual fight while it's not the best sniper rifle battle in the series by a long shot that would be the end it's also not the worst that would be

whatever the wolf is the ripoff in Middle Gear Cell at 4. Yeah. Yeah. That is the worst. But laying there on the snow, trying to, like, find her with your scope. And hearing the wolves crying, too. Like, I was what I think about, like, the snow and the sound of the wolves, you know.

And it was so good, they had to do it twice. That's true. My favorite thing about the wolves, though, is getting the baby wolves to pee on you. So then all the big wolves are like, oh, he's our friend. And that's the kind of follow you around with hearts. Crazy little minutia. Yeah, that's so, it's wonderful. I put this in a PlayStation one game.

And we talk about PlayStation 1 games not holding up. I would say Metal Gear Solid is on like a one of the, on a tiny list that when the PlayStation Classic comes out, it better be on there. That's all I got to say. Like, you can tell when we're recording this. It'll almost certainly be on there. Shane knows and he's not saying. Ooh. So, Kat, go ahead and we'll do, like, two oscillators.

Well, this is Hardcore Henry V, and they were talking about the VR missions. And they say, one of my huge pet peeves of modern gaming is the clunkiness of tutorial systems. the vast majority of which commit two unforgivable cardinal gaming sins. They're not actionable, ugh, the dreaded text scroll. They're not fun. I won't necessarily go overboard by comparing it to the likes of Hall of Fame infotainment classics like Carmen San Diego, Agent USA, number munchers, Oregon Trail, could it at least approach its level of World War I of Super Mario Brothers. The short, episodic, arcade-like nature of the missions is a perfect compliment to the sprawling, serialized,

cinema-like nature of MGS, and it even spawned a full game of its own, which arguably. has aged incredibly well in this day and age of short play mobile games in the rise of roguelikes. Yeah, we should definitely talk about Integral and Metal Gear Solid VR missions because Integral was kind of that thing that Japanese publishers like to do or used to like to do where international edition. Yeah, like I guess you kind of get that now with like Game of the Year editions that bundle in a lot of DLC and that sort of thing. But before that existed, what would happen was games would come out in Japan and they would be fine and then they would be localized for the U.S.,

and the developers would have time to tinker and say, oh, all the stuff that we didn't get to do before deadline. We can do that now. Back in the day, there were no patches or title updates for things. It's like, we have time to fix all these bugs we had to ship. But it wasn't just bug fixes. Like, they would add stuff. I don't think the original Japanese version of Metal Gear Solid

had, like, the costumes that you unlock after. Like, you know, you can, if you beat the game, you can play as Solid Snake dressed as James Bond in a tuxedo, which is ridiculous in Alaska, but it's still like, really speaks to sort of the origins and the inspirations behind the series. Well, they also went back and put the English voices in the

Japanese version because they were so proud of them that they were really good with Japanese subtitles. But the big change in Integral was the second disc of hundreds of new VR missions, and that is awesome. And there were a few VR missions as training exercises from the title screen of the original game, but they were very basic

and rudimentary. Whereas, yeah, VR missions, the standalone disc, just goes nuts. Well, and it starts out kind of normal, but by the end, they're getting really fanciful and wacky and crazy. And, you know, everyone was just dying for more Metal Gear Solid. And this was a lot more that you could play in quick bits. And I had friends who didn't have the patience to play all the way through Metal Gear Solid who really got into the VR missions. Oh, really. Interesting. Yeah, the VR missions were like completely story free. It was just, just sneak around

and make use of every tool. And there's a lot of stuff in the Metal Gear Solid sandbox that I don't think people really got to explore a lot because the game does really push you to play stealth. And so you have this huge arsenal of weapons, but how much do you really use like the FAMAS or something? You don't use it that much. Right. So there were whole groups of missions just around like a certain weapon or getting to do crazy things with the Stinger and grenades. And yeah, it was really fun.

And I remember it came out at like 3499 or 3999. And, you know, it was pretty popular for what's ostensibly a weird add-on spin-off thing. Wasn't there a ninja mode? Yeah. That was a big draw. Yeah. That was the big draw. There were like the last five missions.

You got to play as gray fox. Is that the one where you, as you complete more missions, you can get closer to Mei Ling? Yes. Okay, I thought so. There's a photograph mode because that's what they do. And also, if you beat all the missions, I believe there was a tiny teaser for Metal Gear Solid 2, which was just like a photo of Metal Gear Ray. Right.

Cool. So, yeah, definitely very much a product of its time. But Integral came out in Japan, but obviously it didn't make sense. for them to reissue a very slightly improved version of the American version again in America. So they just did VR missions as a standalone. I also once at E3 played the game.com version of Metal Gear Solve it, which never came out. I just had a very faint memory of that. It was probably still better than Twin Snakes.

All right. So one final letter from Juan Guterres. For some reason, okay, this one gets to something that I've been talking about and kind of like saying, I don't know as an outsider, but here's the answer. For some reason, I was able to play the original MSX-2 Metal Gear 2 before Metal Gear Solid. While I like MGS, I don't appreciate it like most others, since to me it's only a 3D version of Metal Gear 2, similar to how Jeremy feels when comparing a link to the past with Ocarina of Time. To this day, I prefer Metal Gear 2 over Metal Gear Solid, and I even prefer Ghost Babel over Metal Gear Solid,

particularly plot-wise. It's my favorite Metal Gear game in that aspect except for the idiotic jack twist at the very end. Well, not on the level of Metal Gear Solid 3. I think the original Metal Gear Solid is far superior to Metal Gear Solid 2 and future 3D titles. I became disinterested in the

franchise with 2 and 4, but I will always remember the original as a good game not as good as Metal Gear 2, but a good 3D adaptation. I think I'm allergic to this person's opinions. I mean, it's an interesting, really weird fringe opinion, but that's cool that kind of opinion exists, actually. Yeah, I mean, I was

wondering, like, if you played Metal Gear 2 before Metal Gear Solid, how does Metal Gear Solid impact you? And at least in one case, you know, you can't build a federal case out of this, but certainly in this one instance, like someone played Metal Gear 2 first and came to the third one and was like, I've done this already. I thought I was a metal gear hipster by liking Peace Walker so much. Oh, Peace Walker's great, though. It's an interesting opinion because I think the comparison to Link to the Past doesn't quite hold up to me because Link to the past holds up so magnificently well if you pick it up today and I think it's better than Akron of time by a fairly large margin whereas it's not archaic like solid snake yeah but if I pick up

at Metal Gear 2 while it's an excellent eight-bit game it doesn't hold up as well yeah I think the fact that none of us have made it all the way through it did I haven't yeah I tried yeah I really tried I was just thinking after this podcast maybe I'll finally try to finish solids night I can pick up lynch of the past anytime any place and it just plays really well I do think one five You mentioned Ghost Babel. I think if there ever was another remake, you know, it'd be cool because I'd never got revisited, right? Wouldn't that be cool if the remake goes on? Metal Gear Acid, make it happen, the remake.

Ooh. Yeah, well. You know, I really thought that if Kojima hadn't left Konami and gone off to do his own thing, I really feel like at some point we would have gotten a remake of the original Metal Gear that kind of ties everything together because clearly he was building up to that with the sort of final twist of Metal Gear Solid 5 where you discover, oh, the big boss at Outer Heaven, the original Outer Heaven, wasn't maybe actually really a big boss. So, yeah, I would love to go back and experience that in sort of modern 3D because the original Metal Gear holds up really well.

If you play the MSX version, the NES version is kind of garbage. But the MSX version, you know, I played it through it all the way for the first time last year to sort of celebrate Metal Gear's 20th anniversary. No, 30th anniversary. That's right. That's right, because we're old. And I was really surprised by just how consistent it is and how well-structured, how thoughtful the design is, how, you know, it's a game about stealth and almost every sort of situation in the game, like there's a lot of thought given to lines of sight

and where enemies spawn and so forth. And there are places where you have to be careful about walking onto the screen because you'll be spotted right away, but you're armed with the binoculars so you can look ahead and say, oh, that's where the bad guys are going to be. So until you get to, like, the very end where it's meant to be more of an action game,

it does really feel like, oh, they put a lot of thought into stealth, and the overall mechanics hold up, and a lot of the fights are the same fights you see in Metal Gear Solid and subsequent games, kind of iterating on itself. I find it odd that it's very difficult to play this game on modern things,

and it's never collected in compilations. You always get two and three in Peacewalkers, or two and three, but for whatever reason, you can buy this on PS3 and Vita and PSP, of course, but good luck playing it on your new as of 2013 consoles. It's very odd. Shane, I'm looking at you.

Hopefully it finds its way back. Somehow. Well, I mean, I think it's a victim of the fact that the PS4 hasn't been collecting PlayStation games at all, which is why we don't have Final Fantasy 8 there either. Yeah, I don't know what the deal is with Final Fantasy 8, but I would like

to see that show up sometime. Bring Swole back. It's eyes on me. Too much money. So there's still a lot we could talk about with Metal Gear Solid, you know, the story and the characters and everything. But I don't think we have enough time. So maybe we should just do like a deep dive into the story someday, like a book club someday in the future. Maybe for the 30, 25th anniversary. I don't know. I need to go back and replay the original Metal Gear Solid.

I will say that when I did my list of the best Metal Gear Games, like I ranked them all, I put Metal Gear Solid at number two. because it's such, compared to the other Metal Gear Solid games, which are very, they're sprawling and they're ambitious, and it feels like Kojima almost goes too big. Metal Gear Solid 1 is actually fairly tight in its scope for the most part. Yeah, I mean, that really comes across in Metal Gear Solid 4 when you revisit Shadow Moses Island and you go through the whole thing and like, it would be like five minutes except there's a whole lot of disc install loading.

Yeah, the only padding in this game I feel is changing the key card in that one section. And it's like the only time where it feels like... And fetching the sniper rifle. Yeah. But if you know what to do, you can do this pretty quickly, actually. I mean, to actually just revisit the story, I could loan you. I have the DVDs that are like the Bomb Deslaix, like the Ashley Wood Art, visual novel, animated DVDs of Metal Gear Solid 1 and Metal Gear 2. So you can just like watch all the story in cool cutscene form.

It has one of the best final battles of any game I've ever played, where beginning with the fight against Metal Gear Rex and then the big fist fight against Liquid. Which was done so much worse in Metal Gear Solid for her. Oh, God. They couldn't use the theme song, God damn it. And then the Secretary of Defense is going to nuke Shadow Moses Island and you've got to get out and you're on the, you're escaping the Jeep with either Otocon or Merrill and you're fighting people and you're just like, it was really. That was like the first escape scene like that in a game, really. Well, I mean, there was Metroid, but different. So, Kat, you need to talk about the fact that you've never beaten the game with Merrill.

I have never beaten the game with Merrill. I would always, you always get to that point where you're being tortured, yeah. So you've been captured, you're being tortured, and it's understood that you can tell them to stop. But if you tell them to stop, Merrill's going to die. And what you have to do is you have to resist a torture by tapping really fast and being able to hold out. And I would always get to the point, the last one, the hardest one. I could never do it. And I was always petrified.

I was going to get sent back quite a long time. Because they tell you explicitly, you haven't saved in a while, have you? You're going to lose a lot of progress. Like, adding just that extra, like, bit of tension that if you screw this up, it's like, choose Merrill or choose losing an hour of progress. And I could not tap fast enough, I guess. It was hard. They made the torture easier for the integral release.

Really? Interesting. They removed the fourth part of it. So I didn't care about Merrill much anyway, so I just let her die. But Merrill was from police knots. She has cool hair. She did. I always forget that she was actually in the game

until people, like, mentioned her because I always think about Odecon and Snake and literally she lived. Yeah, I let her die my first time through, but then I immediately played through again and the final scene, like, I guess Meryl and Snake go off into the sunset, but in my game, it was always Odecon

and Stake going up in the sunset. And then there's a 2001 reference, so what's not to love. You can watch all 45 minutes of her wedding, I'm an Elgersoll for four. Yeah, boy, how do you. The monkey, the monkey, The monkey got an invite.

That pisses me off to this day. Why would you invite a monkey to your wedding? It's got diapers. It's properly dressed. I guess she did marry poopie pants, guys. Yep. It all fits. Oh, God.

Let's not talk about metal gear solid. We're doing a podcast about this. I need to gather the druthers to replay it. And I really want to do another podcast. I should definitely be on that one. God, that was when I was just getting into the games press. Me too. I was just getting out.

I went to the Secret Island to review. I really, this is slightly outside the scope of this podcast, but I remember you, arguing heatedly about Metal Gear Solid 4 on one up yours. It has issues. Yeah. All right. So,

I'll see. Is there anything else we should cover before we call it a day? I mean, we didn't mention the soundtrack, but I think it is of note that it, you know, it's an amazing soundtrack by multiple different people.

And yeah, and whenever I go back and revisit, I'm like, oh yeah, this music's great. Yeah, but it sounds more cohesive than the,

like, the Police Knot soundtrack, which is by a bunch of different people, too. And it's all over the place. It's like smoky jazz. And then it's the Sweenitin soundtrack. Right. And then it's like rock.

Yeah. And you're like, what's happening here? And it's before it went full on like bombastic film score, which is fine for later games. But yeah, this is much more Japanese game music. Yeah. I mean, Metal Gear Solid too, they brought in Harry Gregson Williams to do like the cinema sequences. And the cinema sequences in Metal Gear Solid do have more of a film like quality to them. Whereas the, you know, the gameplay sequences, they have more.

more of like this sort of ethereal sort of electronica kind of sound to it, but there's like a choral element. It's a really great, like very atmospheric, just like the graphics and the look of the game. It fits perfectly. But yeah, the later games really lost that. And I love Norhiko Hebino's work. I think he's a great musician. But I think pushing more toward the film aspect and like making it more Hollywood, something important was lost. And it's a shame. Is this the first game where we see a character wet their pants? Quite possibly. I mean, I'm sure in Japan, like, Cato and Ken or something, there's probably like, yeah, some PC engine game.

I was just thinking about that because when Gray Fox is approaching one of the soldiers after killing everybody, which is a great scene, by the way, you walk in, and you see all these bodies everywhere lying against walls, and you're like, well, what's that happened here? And then you see Gray Fox stalking up to a guy, and you see the spreading urine, and you're like, oh, man, this is serious, right? You haven't seen that in a game before. so dubious milestone from that whole battle like that's that's the most impressive battle in the game and to me even if it's not the most like the best and most tightly constructed but the fact that it takes place in this sort of mundane environment right yeah the fact that it's in an office and things are flying around paper's flying there was consideration given to the fact that hey this is not just like a sterile battlefield it's like there's clutter all over the place and so papers and desks are like instead of a boss fight in a video game it's in some boss room it's like oh here's a thing that's going to kill you just in your office yeah this was just be This was before physics-based objects in games. This was before ragdoll physics and before hammock, all hand-coded. And the stuff flying everywhere was to show you where ninja was. It wasn't just for a fact.

It was one of the hardest battles in the game as well. And on top of that, that whole thing was also meant to be a narrative callback to Metal Gear 2 to tip you into an important story part. But of course, we missed that because we hadn't played Metal Gear 2. So when someone called us and said, I'm one of your fans, you didn't know what he was talking about because you hadn't played Metal Gear 2. But there's a lot of layers to that battle. That's really great. I think that scene does also crystallize what's so special about Metaguer Solid and how, like, at that time, we take for granted now,

oh, things are going to happen in an environment that isn't a regular boss fight. That was really new and, like, changed the trajectory of modern AAA gaming. I think this game is really important. And, like, people who have trouble going back and playing it, like, you try to imagine what it was like 20 years ago. If I put yourself in that frame of mind, I think everybody should actually play through this game. Yeah, I mean, I've played games that predate this that take place in sort of mundane settings, but they don't do anything with it.

Like, you know, Ghostbusters too, you're fighting through a museum, but, okay, so you have, like, museum ghosts. Nothing in the actual game environment is interactive. Whereas here, the thought was, you know, like when you're in a tank hanger, you can crawl under tanks, but that's about all you're doing. But here in an office, there's lockers and there's computers and there's papers on tables and desks. That's part of what makes Shadow Moses feel like a real place. I mean, it all feels connected. All of the props feel appropriate. We were talking about Chroma Key, it has a distinct color palette.

I'm always down for games that are set in a winter setting. And it's actually a more interesting environment than the Big Shell, which is an MGS2, which we're not talking about. But I think in comparison, you kind of, oh, man, I really miss those environments of Metal Gear Solid. They managed to get it back with Metal Gear Solid 3 where you had the jungle and then the base and it felt like Shadow Moses, but with an expanded. Shadow Moses is cohesive, but yet diverse. We haven't talked about Revolver Osloat at all. And I just want to say very briefly, I think it's interesting. He probably has, of all the boss fights, one of the most mundane of all of them.

I mean, it's memorable the first time he walks in and he's spinning his revolvers and everything. But I thought it was always funny that not only does he survive the events of Shadow Moses Island, he becomes one of the most significant characters in the entirety of Metal Gear Solid. I don't know if that was planned from the beginning. Which is funny because he's not exactly the most memorable character in the original game. I mean, he's kind of distinct. He's like a gunslinger guy. Yeah, he's cool.

That battle is too easy. He gets his arm cut. He gets his hand cut off. He escapes. He somehow lives. Yeah, that goes in some weird directions. But right there in the game, it's interesting because he is the first boss. So he's not like, you know, not super challenging and you don't really think too much of him. But he's the only one that doesn't die fighting Snake and he doesn't get killed by Fox Die,

which we'll have to talk about in some other episode because, man, that's a thing. Yeah, him getting his hand cut off sent us down a pathway in the series set. He was like, oh, gosh. But I mean, he plays into the Stinger at the end where, you know, the game ends. And you think it's over. And then over the black screen, you get the teaser where he's talking to, oh, it turns out the president who is Solid Snake's brother. Of course. So, yeah, like that whole, that kind of kicks off everything.

And I think already at that point, you know, Kojima was like, this guy is, you know, there's more to him than it seems because he was actually part of the manipulation behind the whole plan. And that kind of does go to like the final thing I want to say, which is it's going to piss awesome listeners. But I think in light of the fact that, yes, Brent Kavanaugh was just. confirmed to the Supreme Court. This was the first game I'd ever played that actually came out and said, you know, maybe the Pax Americana is not entirely good and the U.S. government isn't necessarily great. That was kind of a brave thing for a video game to posit in the, you know, the peaceful Clinton era where everyone was happy and the economy was good and everything seemed great.

Cold War was over. Yeah, like, okay, so there's some stuff in Somalia, but who really cares? And this was an outsider perspective, a Japanese perspective, saying, hey, you know, actually everything America has done in the past 50 years has kind of made the world worse. And that's not good. And I don't think we really – I mean, that kind of like stuck with me and it kind of irritated me. But as I've played more of the games and have gotten older and become more aware of the world, I'm like, oh, yeah, okay. When he's doing his big Infantarib speech, they actually intercut some real footage in there. there are some cargo planes

and they were making references to like Desert Storm and everything and that was the first game I can think of that was making... Yeah, there's lots of stock footage of missiles and stuff when Natasha is talking about materials unaccounted for and nuclear proliferation.

And this is around the time that we first started hearing about Gulf War Syndrome and that kind of thing and so to me that even though Metal Gear Solid was a really fantastical kind of game It also kind of grounded it in real world events in a lot of respects. Yeah, Jeremy's right about that different point of view because in some ways, Kojima has very facile points of view on things, but other ways it is something that was foreign to American people. Like, growing up, you learned that it's like, well, we had to bomb Japan and a very important man pushed a button,

and it was what we had to do. And, you know, it wasn't easy, but we did it, and we won the war, blah, blah, blah. And then it's like, then you start seeing stuff like Grave of the Fireflies and Bearfoot Genn and actual people from Japan talking about how terrible nukes are. You're like, hmm, maybe we committed genocide on a mass scale and things were just so fucked up. No one ever called us on it, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

And on top of that, you know, it's interesting that this whole game is framed as kind of a Tom Clancy novel that you can play. That's what it really feels like. But there aren't any Tom Clancy novels that are like, oh, maybe America's not actually that good. I can hear him rotating in his grave. I mean, like the new Jack Ryan series kind of gets into that a little bit, but not on a level. I mean, Tom Clancy was always a hard right-winger, cold warrior type guy. Yeah, I think he would probably see the current Jack Ryan series and be like, what are you doing? Finally, everyone on Retronauts renounces America.

That's right. So, comrades, final thoughts on Metal Gear Solid. I think it is good, duh? Yes, and I think that there should be some way to replay it on a new system or perhaps a classic version of an old system. I think it's rightfully ensconced among, like, the most important game. games of all time. And I think that, you know, I don't feel like I have to justify it that much. I think, you know, it's in the text, actually. Like, it's still there. You don't have to like, it's not like going back and playing Space War or something. Like, you know, I think a 16-year-old could play this game today and get what they need to get out of it. I mentioned earlier that IGN named it its number one PlayStation game of all time. And I am strongly in agreement with that. I think that it is one of the two or three essential games that you have to play if you ever play a PlayStation game. It bridged. the period of the 32-bit era of like Mario 64 and Banja Kazui and that kind of thing with the PlayStation 2 era where we started getting Splinter Cell and Halo and all of these other games. It really pushed the envelope in so many ways and actually holds up magnificently. I mean, it's so, when you look back on it like the ways that it broke the fourth wall, the way that it used gameplay to advance the narrative, the boss battles, the voice acting it. It's,

really, it was really tremendously ahead of its time. And it's one of a handful of games that I can say just completely, completely blew my mind when I played it all the way through and got out of the first room and actually played the game. I still feel like 1998, fall 1998, is the greatest, most fertile, most creative, most important single season of video games ever. And Metal Gear Solid is not the only reason why, but it is a big part of that. And it fits really neatly into other games that we've talked about, like Half-Life and Mega Man Legends and Thief and so on and so forth, Tenchu, Parasite Eve, like all these games from 98 Ocarine of Time as part of this, like, groundbreaking moment in video games where finally the technology and the ability for developers to make use of that technology caught up to developers' ambitions to do something more than just, you know, like here's Pac-Ban, here's Mario. now they could be something more substantial and start to approach other media. And I feel like, you know, taking it from that perspective, Metal Gear Solid did, you know, push video games into other media more effectively than any other game of that era.

And in that sense, it really laid the groundwork for what has come since then, for better and for worse. And, you know, I had a column on Polygon recently that said it's kind of ironic that video that Metal Gear pushed the the medium forward while being mired in his own past and every Metal Gear game is kind of just like a reprise of this which is a reprise of Metal Gear 2 and you know that's that's I guess that's okay like it's its own thing and at this point the series I don't really think is going to see any sequels certainly not from Kojima so it kind of becomes this like I don't know sort of a self-contained piece and to me this is maybe not the best piece but definitely the most

important piece of that. Anyway, so that has been an episode in Metal Gear, and again, I feel like we could do a story episode like Book Club kind of thing. So maybe that'll come someday in the future, but we have other Metal Gear games to talk about first and other games, other series, other franchises.

But hey, it's been 20 great years, and I still really enjoy the game. So, for Retronauts, this has been Jeremy Parrish. Everyone, why don't you tell us where we can find you on the internet? You can follow me at Shanewatch. all one word on Twitter.

Follow me on Twitter at the underscore catbot. You can also go read my website, US Gamer. We have a lot of good stuff. And if you are kind of, if you like and if you enjoy retronauts, I think you'll find a lot of articles that are kind of your taste. Also, I host an RPG podcast. I hired people who specifically have my tastes. And I also have an RPG podcast called Acts of the Blood God,

which focuses explicitly on RPGs. My friend and coworker Nadia Oxford is my co-host. And every week, right now we're in the midst of a top 25 RPG countdown. The last episode we did, as I was recording this episode, was Fallout New Vegas. So you will find. What number was that? That was number 13. For people who are listening to this, who are more inclined toward Japanese games,

I think it's a foregone conclusion that we'll be talking about Crohn Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 before too long. Spoilers. Gosh. Hey, it's Bob Mackey. I'm on Twitter as Bob Servo and I have other podcasts going on. In fact, an entire podcast network separate from Retronauts.

It's the Talking Simpsons network and that's at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. I do to other podcasts. Talking Simpsons, obviously. That's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. And what a cartoon where we talk about a different cartoon

from a different series every week. If you like old stuff, we talk about old cartoons all the time and there's lots of stuff happening at the Patreon. Tons of bonus stuff, interviews, bonus series. Most of these people have been on it. Shane is not, but we'll find a way

to get them on there. at some point. Yes, so that's patreon.com slash talking Simpsons for all of your Simpsons and cartoon needs. And if you have any money left over after throwing it at Bob,

Retronauts is also Patreon-supported, and that means my life and existence are Patreon-supported because Retronauts is my thing that I do full-time. I'm Jeremy Parrish, the retronauts guy, who is not the Bob,

the other retronauts guy. Anyway. I also make money, but don't let that stop you from giving to us. The more, the merrier. So that's at patreon.com slash retronauts. And, of course, you don't have to pay money to us to listen to this podcast.

We are available for free if you download us from iTunes or whatever. That's also fine. But, you know, supporting us means you get the episodes a week early at a higher bit rate quality so they sound better. And you can enjoy the chip tunes more. And there are no ads. So, you know, it's tit for tat. It's not just a one-way road. We give as you give.

So everyone, thank you for listening again. It's been a pleasure talking about Metal Year Solid because we love it. And it's a good game 20 years later. And we'll talk about it some more in the future. So look forward to that. In the meantime, we'll talk about other things. So look forward to whatever we talk about. You know,