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Metal Gear Solid Mobile

Even in a series as prolific as Metal Gear, it is not immune to missing or lost releases, and there are blind spots in the series that many don’t know about or haven’t heard of. Metal Gear Solid Mobile is one such game. It is a ‘lost’ game in the series, released solely on mobile platforms & not widely publicized. It’s also unique in how advanced it was for a mobile game at the time. MGS Mobile reaches toward the level of the console games, despite a smaller screen & keypad controls, and it gets might close that lofty aim.

Metal Gear Solid Integral Staff Commentary

They say it takes a village to raise a child. Perhaps exponentially so, in the creation of a video game. All of the moving parts – the circuitry that powers it, the code that gets it running, textures painted and models animating on screen, the timing and waveform of sound coming out of the speakers – are so complex and deeply entwined, that it can feel like a miracle whenever a game just stands on its own legs and waddles around, let alone one that is released in as mature and polished state like Metal Gear Solid did in 1998 on Sony’s PlayStation. When it was reissued in Japan a year later, with the subtitle Integral and more content, the staff behind the masterpiece snuck in their thoughts and experiences in making the game. These comments were presented in the game through the CODEC system, on a specific frequency (140.07). Each stage has a different set of comments, with some overlap, and each one is tagged by the staff member who wrote it. Curiously, there are no comments from Hideo Kojima himself. These insights reveal a group of people working at the forefront of design and storytelling in a nascent medium, grappling with the bleeding edge technology of the day. Here are some of the more notable comments, rendered in English.

The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2

Video game history, like all history, is hard to record. The making of a game produces ephemera; design documents & pitches, early concept sketches, storyboards, research trips, discarded sprites & models, and ideas that just didn’t fit the final product. Tracking down a cart or that unlabeled DVD-R lying in a forgotten back room somewhere is often just the tip of the iceberg. It takes hard work to catalog all of that after the fact, let alone while it’s being made. Hideo Kojima and his team at Konami decided to do just that with the development of Metal Gear Solid 2. The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2 is a rare, intimate look at the making of a video game, by people who were engaged in precisely that very act.

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops

After the unique card-based experience of the two Metal Gear Acid games comes a more familiar looking entry of Metal Gear on the PlayStation Portable in 2006. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops was designed for the ground up to be a portable experience, if the name didn’t give it away, and its experiments in handheld play ended up becoming the first taste of how the series would move forward with new hardware. The game is overshadowed by its superior sequel, but that makes Portable Ops an important, if shaky, first step toward something new in the hallowed series.

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake

Metal Gear was a hit in Japan, and its NES port reached international players in Europe and North America, but the people behind it hadn’t heard much of that success. They turned their attentions to cyberpunk and detective work with the ambitious visual novel adventure, Snatcher. It wasn’t until a chance encounter with a fellow Konami employee in the Famicom division on the train ride home that Hideo Kojima learned of a sequel being done without his team’s involvement, titled Snake’s Revenge. His colleague encouraged the director to make something more official, from the original source. By the end of the ride, Kojima had a story in mind, one drawing on the Cold War, nuclear proliferation, and humans’ dependency on fossil fuels. After a conversation with higher ups the next day, work began on Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. While it was eventually released in July 1990 on the MSX2, the game took the rough draft found in Metal Gear and improved on it in just about every way.

Metal Gear Solid Touch

Console games and mobile games are often distinct experiences, and what works on one doesn’t necessarily work on another. A high flying big budget game like Metal Gear Solid 4, for instance, doesn’t really translate well to a small screen. In 2009, Kojima Productions put out Metal Gear Solid Touch, exclusively on iOS devices. It’s a rough approximation of the PS3 exclusive, becoming a shooting gallery rather than the stealth action the series is known for. Compared with some of the other mobile experiments from Konami at the time, it works as a pick up and play game, but ultimately ends up uninspired.

Metal Gear Solid (Game Boy Color)

After the release of Metal Gear Solid on the PlayStation, everyone wanted more Metal Gear. That included Konami’s Eurpoean branch, who requested a portable version of the game to capitalize on its success. With the help of TOSE, the prolific ghost developers based in Kyoto, Japan, Konami Computer Entertainment Japan (KCEJ) set out to come up with just that, creating the first portable entry in the series. Instead of shrinking the PS1 original down, they crafted a new scenario for the game and made it every bit as full featured as the PS1 game, while looking like its 8-bit origins. Metal Gear: Ghost Babel (or Metal Gear Solid outside of Japan), far from a quick cash in on the series’ popularity, stands head & shoulders with its bigger siblings, despite the portable format.

Metal Gear

“Operation Intrude N313: Infiltrate the enemy fortress, Outer Heaven, and destroy Metal Gear, the final weapon!” By late 1980’s, Konami were a well known entity in the broad culture and industry that grew around the new medium of video games in Japan. Starting out making successful arcade games like Frogger, Time Pilot, and Contra, the company quickly jumped into the burgeoning world of home consoles, following the success of devices like the Famicom, Commodore 64, and MSX. More games needing to be made meant more people needed to make them, so the company staffed up quickly. College graduates were scooped straight from graduation and placed on projects, no matter their grasp of Assembly, C, or BASIC. These new hires were often handed a brief proposal for a game idea, often following some trend or demand, and given a short amount of time, sometimes only a handful of months, to put everything together. Hideo Kojima was one such hire, brought into Konami to develop for the MSX platform. After working as Assistant Director on Penguin Adventure, a sequel to one of the company’s early forays into console development, he was promoted to Director for his next project and handed a proposal for a war action game, a popular trend at the time. Only, the game materialized with a very different design, one that emphasized evasion rather than confrontation. Initially dubbed “Intruder”, the name that was eventually settled on was “Metal Gear“, after the bipedal mecha that is of central importance to the story, when it was released in July 1987 for the MSX2 in Japan.

Metal Gear

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