Metal Gear Solid

Metal Gear Solid arrived on PC two years behind the console original, but in a version that could take advantage of higher resolutions and sharper visuals than had previously been available. Playing as Solid Snake, the player infiltrates a remote military facility in Alaska, where a group of renegades has seized the base along with a secret weapon of mass destruction and is holding hostages. The goal isn't to shoot your way through the facility, but to slip through unnoticed, rescue the hostages, and find out what's really going on inside.

The gameplay is built around a top-down view with a fixed camera, a radar showing guards' fields of vision, and patient creeping along walls. Snake hides inside boxes, knocks on walls to lure guards away, uses a suppressor, crawls through ventilation shafts, and must break line of sight and flee when spotted until the alert dies down. The game is further defined by boss fights, each governed by its own rules and often forcing the player to think outside the usual conventions, along with extensive radio dialogue that carries the story forward through themes of genetics, nuclear deterrence, and a soldier's duty. It was precisely this cinematic direction of scenes, editing, voice acting, and music that made Metal Gear Solid a revelation on release, since almost nobody had seen an action game told with this much confidence before. The PC version also included an extensive package of training challenges that let players practice individual mechanics separately from the campaign.

The original ranked among the best-reviewed games of its generation and is essential to the entire stealth genre, having shown that sneaking around could carry a big story and strong characters. The PC port was received mostly positively, with objections aimed at the controls and its late arrival. Today the game is best found in later collections, but even so, its pacing, humor, and fourth-wall-breaking ideas age remarkably slowly, and many of its scenes still stick in players' memories two decades on.