You needed to play it as a little kid when it first came out.

We were just getting used to inventories. Stealth in games simply didn’t exist. The whole concept of key cards as far as I know didn’t exist, and even that whole structure of parts of the game that were blocked off behind abilities you didn’t have yet, or ways you hadn’t realized you could use your existing abilities, was still pretty brand new.

The thing I wish it had done, which Zelda 1 did very well but which very few games even up to the modern day have the balls / level design skill to do, is gate parts of the game behind combat that is just straight-up too hard for you yet. Almost always, the Metroidvania structure includes parts that are challenging, but everything you can reach is doable if you focus on it for a bit. And then, when you do them, you can unlock some more doable stuff. Zelda wasn’t like that. There were parts you could reach that would just outright murder you. You had whole parts of the game that were locked off behind enemies that were still too hard for you, for a long time, and so going into those areas felt like a for-real adventure. Once you got kitted up enough to be able to go hang out there, and explore it in detail and survive as long as you were alert, you feel super badass. It leads to this feeling of accomplishment that’s totally different from how it would feel if it was the exact same difficulty curve but all the stuff that was too hard for you gets locked away until you were ready for it.

Anyway, Metal Gear wasn’t like that. The combat was honestly pretty much just bad, even for the time period. But it introduced stealth and a new approach to big sprawling worlds, where you can’t even really make sense of the map because it is so non-Euclidean and you’re wandering through this bizarre and hostile environment. It’s like a Metroidvania where at any given time, you can only find 3 different gates, and they’re all locked, and so you have to go back over all your previous stuff and try to figure out what you missed. How all the different trucks move, what you can and can’t use your items for, finding new information or new frequencies for your radio, it was just this really surprisingly complex game that was still while the whole industry was shaking off the Atari era and trying to do real games. It was a new take on Metroidvania, all cramped corridors and locked doors and rooms that insta-kill you instead of open sprawling maps and inviting ledges you can’t reach yet.

It didn’t even have a plot, and it still had a massive coherent plot for the games of the time. It had a plot! I don’t know man. You can’t even really compare it to the “she breathes through her skin” era of Metal Gear because Metal Gear just defected from its original form into a totally different class of game, the Cinematic Bullshit-O-Rama With Occasional Gameplay At Times. It’s one of the modern AAA games industry’s favorite genres. But the old Metal Gear, for all its significant flaws, was a genuine and successful effort to move the medium forward.

Plus I was a little kid and I enjoyed playing it. I saw this magazine ad for it that was just this massive list of all the different items you can get, and it just wasn’t like anything I’d seen before. And, they followed through; they didn’t just pad out the list with weirdness, they actually thought of something you could do with everything. What about these cigarettes? Surely that’s just a little joke, right? No. The cigarettes are useful. You need them at one point. Of course you do. The empty cardboard box is useful. Everything is useful.