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In 1985 the MSX2 computer was released and was fairly popular at the time. In 1986 Hideo
Kojima joined Konami to work on games for the MSX2. Kojima had problems creating games
due to his lack of familarity in programming. One day his bosses told him to create a combat
game for the system. In 1986 combat games where very popular in
the arcades due to the influence of films like Rambo First Blood part 2.
In that same year the game Nemesis, also known as Gradius was ported from the arcade to the
original MSX computer. In that game due to hardware limitations you
could only place 32 sprites on the screen at one time. Also horizontally you could only
place 8 sprites. The 9th sprite would simply disappear. These restrictions where the standard
for games of the time. For the MSX2 it would take one sprite to create
a character and a second sprite to colour that character. Basically one character would
cost you two sprites. If you wanted to show a bullet that would take up an additional
sprite. And every 9th sprite placed on the screen would disappear.
Kojima had some serious limitations to tackle if he was going to create a combat game for
the MSX2. The first idea he came up with to try and counter this problem was that he would
make a combat game without any fighting. The second idea he had was to make a combat
game that was just about escaping. His third idea was to have a combat game about hiding
from enemies. This would mean it was no longer a combat
game but a stealth game. However this would not mean it would be the worlds first stealth
game. The origins of the genre go back at least as far as 1981 with the video game Castle
Wolfenstein from Muse Software. However what Kojima would do differently is
that he would have a game that was not about escaping but instead about infiltration. Once
he had this idea in place he began writing the characters and story to flesh out the
game concept. The character of Snake was inspired by John
Carpenter's 1981 film 'Escape from New York' starring Kurt Russel as the anti-hero Snake
Plissken. Kojima even wrote a letter to John Carpenter asking for his blessing to use such
a similar character in the game metal gear. Carpenter happily agreed.
Kojima then decided to add a game mechanic that meant the player had to avoid enemies
in order to stay hidden and once the enemy spotted you their algorithim would change.
Simply put as soon as they saw you, the enemies where programmed to chase you. They where
given dynamic artificial intelligence. Metal Gear was released in July of 1987 in
Japan, and September of 1987 in Europe. It was not released in the US.
A reprogrammed version of Metal Gear was released on the Famicon in Japan in December of 1987.
In June of 1988 the game was also ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System and released
in North America. The port of Metal Gear for the NES was not
designed by Hideo Kojima and was not as good as the original. Kojima said the NES version
of Metal Gear was 'A crap game'.
However thanks to these ports Metal Gear was successful enough to warrant a sequel.
When development on Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake began Kojima ran into another problem. He
wanted to create a deeper stealth game but it still had to run on the MSX2 system which
was quickly becoming outdated. The first thing Kojima did was to improve
the enemies line of sight by giving them a wider field of vision. This would make the
game seem more realistic. Kojima also allowed enemies to follow Snake
from one screen to another. But the MSX2 did not have the ability to scroll. To solve this
Kojima decided to place a radar in the upper right of the screen so that the player could
track enemy movements off screen. In Metal Gear, Kojima had added an alert phase
when the player was spotted by an enemy. In Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake Kojima added an evasion
phase after the alert phase ran down. Kojima also gave enemies the abilty to hear, for
instance if Snake walked on a particular surface he would give off a sound that would draw
attention. The game also had more focus on story where
as the original Metal Gear had very short screens of text when other characters spoke
to you on your codec, Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake had much longer conversations and more developed
characters. All these changes added more depth, strategy
and tension to the game. Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake released on July
1990 on the MSX2 in Japan and did not see a release elsewhere.
There was a game called Snakes Revenge released to North America in April of 1990 on the NES.
Kojima refers to this as a 'crap game 'because he had nothing to do with it.
Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake was a hit. But it's success would be nothing compared to the game
that was to follow. A game that would define a generation. Metal Gear Solid!