In the former title players assume the role of Agent 47, a deadly assassin who must eliminate specific targets in gargantuan levels. Now shifting away from Metal Gear Solid, we have another two popular and impactful stealth franchises- Hitman and Splinter Cell. Each entry managed to introduce something new and exciting and significantly impact not only the stealth genre, but the games industry as a whole. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Peace Walker, and now Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain all look, feel, and play differently, but they’re still stealth games at heart. MGS’ commercial and critical success paved the way for future sequels It also opened people’s eyes to the narrative potential within video games, as its story is still considered one of the best.
Though games like Thief and the original Metal Gear were the first to introduce a wealth of stealth mechanics, Metal Gear Solid is the game that popularized the stealth genre. Yet again, like Thief, Metal Gear Solid showed that you don’t need to always shoot people in the head in order to have fun. It’s top-down, you have to sneak around and avoid enemy detection, and use non-combative weapons. If you’ve played Metal Gear before, you’ll find that Metal Gear Solid contains the same gameplay ideas. Of course, that same year saw the release of Metal Gear Solid. In 1998, developer Looking Glass Studios released Thief: The Dark Project, a first-person stealth title set in a medieval steampunk metropolis called the City. It received a direct sequel three years later, but it wasn’t until well into the 1990s and early 2000s that the genre started to come into its own. But not only that, Metal Gear is considered as the progenitor of the stealth genre due to the its gameplay and level design.
Though the game isn’t as mechanically sophisticated as Metal Gear Solid, the basis for the series was set here. Reinforcements will then start appearing off-screen, and Snake has to enter an elevator or eliminate all of the enemies. However, if he’s spotted by a camera or uses an unsuppressed weapon, enemies will have two exclamation marks above their heads. You have to constantly avoid visual contact and you can’t be seen, otherwise the game enters an “Alert Mode.” Sound familiar? If Snake is seen and there’s only a single exclamation mark above enemies’ heads, he can simply move to a different screen and escape the alert status. He travels to the fortified state Outer Heaven and confronts none other than Big Boss himself. The game revolves around a special forces operative codenamed Snake who has to destroy Metal Gear, a bipedal walking tank capable of launching nuclear missiles. Even though 005 is the first game to employ stealth mechanics, it wasn’t until Kojima’s original Metal Gear that the genre finally gained a proper identity.īefore Metal Gear Solid was a tangible thing back on the first PlayStation, Kojima released an overhead action-adventure stealth game for MSX2 in 1987 simply called Metal Gear. If one were to take a glance at a screenshot of 005 it’ll look similar to an Atari 2600 title, like Jungle Hunt. And like most SEGA arcade games of that time, 005’s monitor is vertically mounted. Maybe that’s where Hideo Kojima got his cardboard idea from? Since 005 is an arcade game, it comes in a generic wood-grain panel cabinet and isn’t anything too fancy. You avoid enemies by dodging their flashlights (or field of view), and you can even hide in boxes to avoid detection. Its gameplay mechanics are actually still used today, but they’re a lot more refined now.
This arcade title has you control a spy who has to take a briefcase full of secret documents to a nearby helicopter. This added to the dynamic nature of Metal Gear Solid, something that was almost alien within games prior to its release.The basic blueprint for the stealth genre was set in 1981, when SEGA released what is largely regarded as the first stealth game, 005. On messing up, players always have the chance of hiding somewhere and waiting out on the alarm timer to get things to normal. This allowed players to come up with strategies that definitively worked which alleviated most of the issues that plagued earlier stealth games. The enemies, on the other hand, were as predictable as they were smart. The radar was a handy tool that showed the position of all the enemies within the area, opening up a bunch of tactical options. One of the biggest innovations of Metal Gear Solid lies in its radar. Metal Gear Solid laid the foundations of what would become the pillars for future stealth game design.
However, most of such titles were obscure in nature, complex, and didn't give out the fantasy of being a sneaking spy in the most dangerous settings around the world.
Stealth games were nothing new in 1998, prior to Konami's Metal Gear Solid.