Tons of people worked on developing these games-and the series’ corporate publisher, Konami, certainly exerted an influence-but Kojima is often perceived as the auteur, with the latest being 2015’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain ( MGSV). And, for each title, famed developer Hideo Kojima is credited as director. All of these titles are connected by an ongoing plot that uses shadow organizations, global cabals, and soap opera politics to explore heavy themes such as denuclearization, identity, patriarchy, and patricide. There are five main entries in the series, each an updated take on “Tactical Espionage Action,” each replete with spy-thriller tropes, genre-bending motifs, meta-twists. Even though my mom wasn’t there to watch, I did as she said: I did not kill these digital people I just watched my cousin do it.īut when I was older, I did eventually play MGS as well as all the sequels. I’d never seen anything like it, and although I was an action-movie-obsessed little boy, I wondered if I should be seeing such gratuitous violence. Blood blows out of their heads in pink clouds. Their bodies shake when you spray them with bullets. Unlike the 16-bit beefcakes who grunted upon termination in Chaos, the 3D graphics in MGS made the enemies look more like real people.
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The world was full of human non-player characters that could be killed.
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The game felt like an action movie from the very opening title card declaring that this was the product of a singular director, an artist with a vision-“A HIDEO KOJIMA GAME.”īut in Metal Gear Solid ( MGS), everything was like that level from Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues.
Not only was the game-world exponentially more detailed, but there was also a story-a bonkers one as much about nuclear destruction as it was about the protagonist, Snake, dealing with the legacy of abandonment by his clone source/parental figure. Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues was released four years earlier, but Metal Gear Solid was lightyears ahead. She also had a jewel case with a stark white background, red lettering, and the tagline, “Tactical Espionage Action,” over the title: Metal Gear Solid (1998). The same thing happened when I went to my cousin’s house. This wasn’t the only time my mother’s no-killing rule came up. My mother had given me very clear instructions: I was not allowed to kill people in video games. The enemies change from velociraptors to humans fairly early in the game, but I never got past the level in which they did. “Chaos,” in this case, meant more than just fighting dinosaurs-it meant killing people. When I was a kid, I had a Super Nintendo and two games to pick between: Jurassic Park (1993) and Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues (1994). He has written about pop culture for numerous publications. His fiction can be found in print and online in journals such as Saranac Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Breakwater Review, and more.