Many don’t realize Metal Gear Solid is actually a sequel to two less well-known games in the series, Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, but that’s just as well, because the series didn’t really find its feet until design luminary Hideo Kojima re-imagined the series as a fully-3D PlayStation adventure and took the stealth-action genre mainstream.
In Metal Gear Solid, the hero — codenamed Solid Snake and named after Kurt Russell’s persona (Snake Plissken) in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York — infiltrates a nuclear weapons facility in Alaska’s Fox Archipelago in hopes of thwarting a renegade special forces unit turned terrorist and dubbed FOXHOUND. But instead of battling enemies with exotic weaponry and racking up body counts, players guided Snake through sophisticated environments employing stealth tactics, avoiding the game’s hallmark “Game Over” screen by staying out of sight entirely.