In the early days of gaming, the concept of a military themed game was to always shoot down every enemy on sight. There are a lot of games that focus on this concept which are dubbed as shooters. It’s a game where you control your characters armed with range weapons and shoot everything out of sight. It’s a simple concept as well as addicting and fun but can be challenging for the most part. One of Japan’s renowned videogame companies called Konami has a plethora of shooter games like Contra, Gradius, Life Force, Rush N Attack and a lot more. You could say that the genre was successful and created a lot of money.
It would take one risk taker and visionary from Konami itself to go against the tide. A programmer working for Konami named Hideo Kojima pitched an idea to his superiors back in the day utilizing this concept but in a different way. Instead of going and shooting everything around he gave the choice to hide and stealth. It was an idea that not many of his peers thought that would work and several of his superiors were skeptical about it. In the end they pushed through with it and in 1987 released first for the MSX2 was the game called Metal Gear.
Metal Gear by today is a phenomenon and one of the longest running videogame franchises running for over 27 years and still is. We’re not going to focus on each game for now but rather an overview of how the series has done in its tenure. Metal Gear in its infancy had success spanning a sequel and numerous ports. It was in the boom of the mid 90’s that Metal Gear became a household name. The game went from Metal Gear into being Metal Gear Solid which is still the same series. Solid on the other hand launched the series to superstardom opening the future remakes of its original games.
The Metal Gear series focuses more on stealth and less on action. It’s a genre that on its own garnered success. It was like a suitable alternative compared to the usual action packed games focusing on shooting everybody down. There have been numerous games under the franchise and they have currently revised most of these turning them into collection games packing in more than one game. The story of Metal Gear itself is an elaborate web of military power which started innocently on US soil but has now become a worldwide battlefield. The franchise is still pumping out games and the future for this series is definitely uncertain.
Next time we’ll talk about the individual games that make up the series as well as other important things.
