Metal Gear (1987)
Metal Gear is a 1987 shooter video game made by Konami.
Tense and inventive for 1987, Metal Gear sends a one-man operative named Solid Snake into Outer Heaven, a fortified enemy state, with orders to locate and destroy a bipedal nuclear-armed weapon called Metal Gear. The catch: fighting is almost never the answer. Infiltration means watching guard patterns, ducking into doorways, and moving through a hostile compound room by room without triggering an alert. Hideo Kojima's debut game established stealth as a viable game genre, built on a foundation of patience and information over direct action.
Quick answers
What is Metal Gear about?
Tense and inventive for 1987, Metal Gear sends a one-man operative named Solid Snake into Outer Heaven, a fortified enemy state, with orders to locate and destroy a bipedal nuclear-armed weapon called Metal Gear. The catch: fighting is almost never the answer. Infiltration means watching guard patterns, ducking into doorways, and moving through a hostile compound room by room without triggering an alert. Hideo Kojima's debut game established stealth as a viable game genre, built on a foundation of patience and information over direct action.
When was Metal Gear released?
Metal Gear was released on 13 July 1987.
Who made Metal Gear?
Metal Gear was made by Konami.
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A few thoughts on Metal Gear
For the richer storytelling the series grew into, the Metal Gear Solid: Digital Graphic Novel and Metal Gear Solid 3: Existence carry the mythology across formats, expanding Snake's world into film-length form for those who want the full scope of Hideo Kojima's vision.
Infiltration stories where information matters more than firepower
Solid Snake's mission inside Outer Heaven runs on watching, waiting and staying unseen rather than shooting first, and that same infiltration mindset carries through Ghost in the Shell's cyber-espionage and Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War. Metal Gear Solid 3: Existence and the Metal Gear Solid Digital Graphic Novel extend Snake's own saga into film and comic form, while Assassination Classroom turns a covert kill mission into its entire premise.
Fiction and music that sit with the cost of war
Metal Gear's plot turns on a hidden nuclear-armed weapon and the political fallout of building one, a worry that runs through Old Man's War's soldiers thrown into someone else's fight and Deltron 3030's concept-album vision of robotic future warfare. Neil Young's Living With War turns that same unease into protest music, while The Punisher: One Last Kill follows a soldier who never really left the battlefield behind.
Games that use cutscenes to earn a real story
Metal Gear was one of the first games to lean on cutscenes and codec dialogue to make its story feel as considered as its stealth, a lineage that runs through Half-Life 2's scripted set pieces, Portal and Portal 2's storytelling through level design, The Last of Us's character-first pacing, and God of War 2018's unbroken single-take camera.