The year that Metal Gear Solid was released, 1998, is by far the most important year for the stealth genre. Though predecessors had included stealth mechanics—including Konami's own Metal Gear—advancements toward the turn of the millennium allowed stealth to be elevated from an interesting gameplay aspect to a complete experience. While other important titles dropped in 1998, Metal Gear Solid managed to capitalize best on the genre's newfound potential.
Up until the release of Metal Gear Solid and its contemporaries, stealth games were built almost exclusively around line-of-sight detection, with the stealth portions usually coming as an afterthought to a different core experience. Metal Gear Solid, however, shifted the genre by creating a title where stealth was not only prominent but essential, a concept that many games still owe to Metal Gear Solid.
Metal Gear Solid: A New Complexity to Stealth
The advancement of the stealth gameplay in Metal Gear Solid is a perfect illustration of just how fast technology progressed during the 32-bit era of gaming. While predecessors had played with the idea of sound detection - notably, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake introduced the ability for enemies to detect footsteps as well as shots from unsilenced guns - Metal Gear Solid established a whole plethora of new concerns. Now, not only did players have to contend with the usual line-of-sight and noise detection, but they also had to worry about things as simple as leaving footprints behind in freshly fallen snow.
On the other side of the coin, Metal Gear Solid also equipped players with a handful of new methods for avoiding detection. While players could employ Metal Gear Solid's ever-famous cardboard box to perplex guards, they could also knock on walls to call a guard over and then slip away undetected. The true genius of Metal Gear Solid is that, as a consequence of its complexity, it forced players to adopt a better safe than sorry approach to the game and put stealth above all else.
Metal Gear Solid: Stealth is the Only Option
Even within the earliest examples of stealth games like Beyond Castle Wolfenstein or the original Metal Gear, the stealth mechanics could be more or less ignored on the path to success. While this is probably true now about Metal Gear Solid with speedrunning tactics and a greater understanding of the enemy's AI, at the time, Metal Gear Solid was extremely difficult to beat without using stealth. It wasn't just an option; it was the only option.
This was largely due to an idea from Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake where the player was equipped with very little in the way of offensive capabilities to start. It's not possible to run around shooting down all the guards since Snake just simply doesn't have enough bullets. Not only this, but the guards tend to have relatively large health pools, whereas Snake is decidedly more vulnerable. As such, in a heads-up fight against multiple enemies, the player is always at a huge disadvantage.
Metal Gear Solid: Rewarding Stealth With Exciting Boss Fights
It seems counterintuitive, but an important aspect of a modern stealth game is to offset sometimes tedious, difficult stealth portions with exhilarating boss fights. Metal Gear Solid is often praised for its bizarre boss encounter with Psycho Mantis, but the battles against Gray Fox, Vulcan Raven, and Sniper Wolf are equally as important. When played as the developers intended, the game has a beautiful ebb-and-flow between tense stealth and all-out, straight-on boss fights.
The result is a game that has a broader reach than strictly stealth-based or strictly run-and-gun sort of titles. Oddly, Metal Gear Solid may be one of the best stealth games of all time partly due to the fact that it forced players to intermittently take a break from its beautifully designed stealth mechanics.
Metal Gear Solid is available on PC and the original PlayStation.