1987 · NES · Famicom
| Region | Date | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| Japan | 22 Dec 1987 | Konami |
| North America | Jun 1988 | Ultra Games |
| Europe and Australia | 13 Dec 1989 | Konami |
Solid Snake, a rookie in the special forces unit FOXHOUND, drops into Outer Heaven, a fortified state in southern Africa, to find a missing agent, Grey Fox, and destroy Metal Gear, a walking weapon that can launch nuclear missiles anywhere in the world. The unusual part is how. Snake starts with nothing, guards with straight lines of sight patrol every screen, and the game wants you to slip past them rather than shoot them.
This page covers the Famicom and NES version. The original came out on the MSX2 computer in July 1987 and was Hideo Kojima's first game. The NES port plays the same basic way, from overhead, one screen at a time. Get seen and guards come running; reach the next screen and you can shake them off. Rescue enough hostages and your rank rises, letting you carry more and take more punishment. Key cards open doors building by building, and a radio lets Snake call his commander, Big Boss, and a small resistance for advice.
Konami released the Famicom port in Japan on 22 December 1987. Ultra Games, Konami's American label, brought it to the NES in June 1988, and Europe and Australia followed in 1989. For North Americans it was the first Metal Gear they could buy, since the MSX2 was never sold there.
Kojima's team did not make it. According to Kojima, another Konami division in Tokyo was handed the MSX2 source code without the original team's consent. Masahiro Ueno, one of its programmers, has said they had three months and orders to make the port as different as possible. It now opens with Snake parachuting into a jungle, adds jungle mazes whose correct path is never explained, turns two basements into separate buildings, and, because of the cartridge's hardware limits, swaps the Metal Gear itself for a supercomputer. The English script is famously clumsy: 'I feel asleep!!' Kojima later publicly disowned this version.
It sold a million copies in the US anyway, and was the second-best-selling game there in October 1988, behind only Super Mario Bros. 2. That success led to two sequels in 1990: Snake's Revenge, made for the NES in the West, and Kojima's own Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake for the MSX2, made in response.
The idea still works. Waiting out a guard's patrol, choosing when to punch a sentry and when to hold still, and slowly opening up a base with key cards and gear add up to a tense, thoughtful kind of action game that few NES games tried. Passcodes record your rank, inventory and progress, so the long campaign is manageable.
The port's rough edges are real. The jungle mazes are guesswork, matching key cards to doors means a lot of trial and error, and with no Metal Gear to fight, the finale falls flat. Computer Gaming World liked the concept at the time and still called it 'something less than a total success'. The Master Collection puts it beside the MSX2 original, which is the better game; play that first and treat this one as history.
Metal Gear was meant to be a war game, and the MSX2 could not draw enough bullets for one. So Kojima took his cue from The Great Escape and made a game about not being seen: hide and seek, in his words, with guards who chase like Pac-Man's ghosts once they spot you. The NES port kept that heart, even with everything else rearranged.
Bernard Suits defined playing a game as 'the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles'. Metal Gear makes the obstacle the point. You can fight through some rooms, and sometimes you must, but the game keeps asking you to choose the harder, quieter path: wait for a guard to turn, slip past, hold your nerve. Nobody needs to do that. Children play hide and seek anyway, because the tension of almost being found is its own reward. Metal Gear turned that playground feeling into a military thriller, and a million NES cartridges in the US alone carried it into homes where players chose to hold their breath alongside Snake.
Read: One must imagine Mario happy →
Verdict · 6/10
A compromised port of a landmark game, rougher and stranger than the MSX2 original but built on an idea that changed action games. Play it for the history, and the original for the real thing.
