Metal Gear, published in 1987 for the MSX home computer, is the genesis of one of the most well-known series in gaming. As such it has served as something of a template for all the following games. There is the soldier/spy main character, typically Solid Snake, who infiltrates an enemy compound starting with nothing but something to smoke, typically a pack of cigarettes. Along the way he is aided by conversations over radio with a wide cast of characters. Like any good radio drama, one of these characters is not, or is more, than they are pretending to be. Enemy soldiers are typically incompetent, blind, and occasionally narcoleptic. The game is punctuated by intermittent battles with boss characters who would seem more at home in a G.I. Joe cartoon. Finally, of course, there is the titular nuclear battle tank, which is being designed by a scientist you must save before you destroy his creation. All these things can be found in their protean form in Metal Gear.

When I started Metal Gear I was expecting to see all these things, if only because I had been well prepared to look out for them by friends who had already played the game. Therefore I was interested to see how these elements were arrange in the narrative. Perhaps more importantly, I wanted see how these bits of story were integrated into the gameplay. Kojima is often accused of relying too much on cut-scenes and long ‘Codec’ conversations to convey the story of his games. I knew that this probably wouldn’t be possible in such an early game, considering the technological limits under which it was made. Bob has written before about Kojima’s increasing maturity and subtlety in this regard, so I also hoped that playing the game would give me more of an appreciation of his growth as a game designer. Finally, I was interested to see how different the controls of the original, two-dimensional Metal Gear were from its three-dimensional heirs.

As it turns out, Metal Gear is very different from the more recent installments. I was right in that the aforementioned Codec conversations were much, much shorter. Cut from dialogues to simple monologues, the person on the other end gives advice pertaining almost exclusively to the room that the player is currently exploring. The reason for this became immediately obvious: instead of the messages coming in sequence, they were simply linked to individual rooms. This meant that I would sometimes call one my contacts and be completely ignored. This was actually somewhat refreshing. Having been acclimated to listening, or skipping through, long speeches each time I just wanted to save in the various Metal Gear Solids, it gave a nice sense that the people on the other end of the line had lives of their own. This radio silence actually made sense in regards to the story, as most of my contacts were not a specially-trained support crew, but resistance members working within the base I was infiltrating. Expect for my primary contact, the leader of my unit, Big Boss, who should have been looking out for me every step of the way. We’ll get into that in a minute.

Since I was playing the version found on the ‘Persistence’ disc of MGS3: Subsistence, I can’t comment too much on the control scheme of Metal Gear, since the buttons had been remapped to the DualShock. What I can say is that the whole pacing of Metal Gear is radically different from the newer ones. Whereas the Metal Gears of the Playstation and Playstation 2 eras have been mostly linear affairs, with the game always making sure you know where you need to go next, and very few options to do otherwise (the exception to this being the second half of MGS2), the original is surprisingly open-ended. With so little advice from your contacts, you are left to navigate the base mostly by yourself. It’s up to you to collect key-cards and find the doors that they open. The base is full of hostages that can be freed, some of them giving valuable advice. However, at no point are you told where you can find any of the hostages. Writing this right now, I can’t even remember if I was ever told that there were hostages. In addition, you must search the base for different weapons and items that will allow you to gain access deeper into the base. The backtracking that all this took, combined with the spare and cryptic narrative, made Metal Gear feel distinctly like another classic game from the same era: The Legend of Zelda.

Comparisons between Metal Gear and The Legend of Zelda however, reveal the lack of polish in the former. Playing through the original Zelda, its striking by how open-ended the game is while still maintaining a sense of direction. Metal Gear typically has this same sense of direction, if not an even more urgent one. There are a few elements however, where the game defeats its own sense of momentum. The most egregious examples of this are the key-cards. There are eight cards, numbered in ascending order, with each door in the game requiring a different card. Unfortunately, there is no indication on any door as to which card it requires to open. Compounding this annoyance is the fact that higher numbered cards do not work on doors that open with lower numbered cards. This leads to frustrating scenarios where you must go in and out of your inventory, trying each card on a door until you find the one that works. It might be Card 7, or Card 4, or even Card 1; you might never find out of course, having died from the poisonous gas filling the room while you fiddled with your collection of security cards.

The second place where the game loses direction is in its use of the Codec. It’s not always clear what kind of help your contacts are supposed to give. For instance, you are told that your second contact in the resistance, Diane, is a weapons expert. When you call her a man picks up and informs you that she is in the shower, or out shopping (the oppression of her country doesn’t weigh too heavily on her mind it seems). It was about halfway through the game before I realized that she was supposed to give me advice on how to defeat the game’s bosses. Jennifer, the contact that gives you the rocket launcher, is equally mysterious. Refusing to talk to you unless you rescue enough hostages to level up to four stars, by the end of the game she becomes your primary support. Overall though, her value is as mysterious as Diane’s. I can think of a particular instance where I spent an hour searching for a key-card to the last door in the base that I couldn’t open, only to find out that I had to call Jennifer to open it for me. While on the surface this seems very clever, deepening the relationship between the player and his support, it’s too inconsistent to become meaningful. The game spends the first half training you that if you call your contacts without reason they’ll simply ignore you, only to spend the second half confronting you with puzzles that you can only solve with their help.

Then there’s Big Boss. Just like your other contacts, he will ignore you if you call him without reason. This is strange seeing as he’s supposed to be looking out for you on your mission. Big Boss is also disconcertingly absent-minded, warning you of things like a dangerous, gas-filled room only after you’ve entered. By the end, of course, the secret is revealed. Big Boss is actually the leader of the organization whose base you are infiltrating, and at the end of the game, after he has tried to lead you to your death several times, you must confront and defeat him. The remarkable thing is the subtlety of this transition. Where all of the elements of later Metal Gears can be found in their primeval form in this first game, the player’s relationship to Big Boss is the only part that feels fleshed-out. Even knowing ahead of time that he was eventually going to betray me, I was still surprised enough to follow orders to my death a couple of times in the later sections of the game. Not because I didn’t know he was leading me into danger, but because I felt I had no other recourse. There was a palpable sense of abandonment at my betrayal by Big Boss, if only because his was the only guidance that was consistently cogent and immediate. Losing that was a far more upsetting event than losing a life.

Someone once told me that Shakespeare was the easily one of the greatest poets to use the English language, but he was only ever a competent playwright. His plays, which are often riddled with inconsistencies and fat, are always forgiven by at least a single passage that exposes both his genius and the expressive possibilities of the spoken word. It’s probably too early to compare Kojima to Shakespeare, but the tendency is the same. I have never played a Metal Gear without tossing the controller away and shutting off the console in seething frustration at some point. His games lack the effortless beauty of Miyamoto’s early work, or the addictive monotony of a Sid Meier or Will Wright game. He has since been surpassed in the integration of narrative and game mechanics by his friend Shinji Mikami. However, moments like Big Boss’s betrayal show a nuance and maturity in Kojima’s approach to creating video games that few others can match. In the end it’s these moments that make all the frustration caused by his eccentric design choices a worthwhile price.

This is the first of two essays on the original Metal Gear games. The second will be published ‘when it’s done’.