Unreal

The hallmark of the Metal Gear Solid games isn’t the presence of one of the Snakes. It isn’t nuclear dread or even hide-and-seek, often involving a cardboard box. And it’s not tactical espionage action. I think it’s a tone, or rather a carefully un-careful blend of conflicting tones. On one side there’s a movement towards steely realism. On the other, there are these bright lunges at absolute fantasy. It’s realism and its opposite. I just tried to google what realism’s opposite actually is, by the way. There is no one standard answer as far as I can see. How very Metal Gear.

None of this is a criticism, by the way. I love this stuff about these games. And it’s in there deep. I noticed this jarring combination the first time I saw Metal Gear Solid in action – or rather the first time I saw it in action again. Many years ago, my housemate at university had the game. I ducked into his room one evening and he was playing the early stages. Here was this game about avoiding enemy patrols and searchlights, a game where your character’s breath or cigarette smoke might give him away to a passing baddy. Cor, I thought. Games are getting – I was 19 at the time – games are getting really real!

And then I ducked in again a few days later. Same game. Same room-mate. Same protagonist, but now he was fighting with an intermittently invisible ninja who was talking about how much he enjoyed being killed. Or something.

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That was an ideal introduction to Kojima’s work. I’m not sure if I could have crafted a better one for myself. Even so, I think the greatest expression of these two impulses – realism and whatever its opposite is called – and the weird dance that unfolds as these two opposing things flow together, is in Metal Gear Solid 3. I’ve spent the last few weeks waiting for Delta, the latest version of this game, and watching various bits of footage old and new. I think if anything, the new version actually only heightens the thrilling collision between realism and whatever realism is not. More detailing: more gleeful confusion.

The thing that’s so exciting to me about this collision in Metal Gear Solid 3 is that you see it most clearly in the places where the game is possibly trying to play it straight. When it’s not playing it straight, Metal Gear Solid 3 is a riot of unrealism, of course. There’s a boss that controls hornets, if I remember correctly. You fight a boss that controls hornets!

But it’s when the game’s seemingly trying to be real that things get truly odd. The game has an injury system, for example – bones can be broken and you need to bandage scrapes and slam home antidotes to poisoned arrow wounds and all that jazz. Sounds like realism! But games are uniquely strange about these kinds of things, whether it’s the pliers-picking-out-bullets animation from Far Cry 2 to Metal Gear Solid 3’s stylish menu of bodily accidents. Including this stuff in the game, and then mediating it by slick UI and whatnot to make it into a playable mechanic, by making health something you can attend to while pausing, just renders the whole thing wonderfully warped from the start.

And this inherent oddness is everywhere in this, the most organic Metal Gear Solid game. The setting’s the jungle! Plants and rivers and all that nature jazz? Sounds a bit more real than the series’ futuristic military bases and deep sea platforms? Sure, it does in a way, but this jungle is carved up into neat little maps and filled with bespoke systems for you to meddle with in the name of stealth or aggression. It’s gloriously, openly hand-crafted in every detail. And did the Soviets even have a jungle? (I asked a friend: sort of, apparently. But also, apparently the game’s jungle is an artificial construction within the fiction of the game itself. This stuff goes dizzyingly deep.)

Snaked and alone.

To put it another way, On the PS2 version, the game’s jungle was a wonderful thing to look at, but it was no more real than the corridors and gantries of Metal Gear Solid 1’s Shadow Moses. It was game-space, all the stranger for being so close to the organic world. And naturally, this is only further confused by the new game’s Unreal 5 graphics.

Whatever version you play, everywhere you look in the game there’s this blend of realism and its opposite. Snake meets a real president, but this real president has to share the game’s green room with that guy who controls hornets. There’s that famous ladder climb, that expands the scope of the tactile in-game world into almost impossible dimensions, and there’s a boss who moves through a dauntingly huge stretch of terrain sniping at you in a battle that can last for genuine real-world hours. All the while the same game also encourages you to defeat that same boss by meddling with the internal clock in the PlayStation.

Ultimately, I’m not sure how much of this is authorial intent and how much is simply a symptom of what Kojima is trying to do elsewhere. It’s worth remembering that a lot of games exist in a sweet spot where questions of realism simply don’t come into it, whether that’s the candy-coated Disney world of Castle of Illusion, or the Indiana Jones-adjacent world of Uncharted. But games, being inherently non-real, generally get super weird the closer they get to any form of realism.

And I sometimes think it’s not realism Kojima’s chasing so much as something that I almost want to term fidelity: an attempt to capture a kind of texture of intricacy. He wants the weird stuff to feel luxurious and richly made, and he wants the same feeling when you’re having a quiet moment in the galley at the start of Metal Gear Solid 2, shooting the ladles and watching them ping back and forth or watching the way rain splatters on your shoulders when you go outside. Is this realism, or is it just luxurious interaction, a mind that notices the little things and wants everything in a game to be memorable? Throw in the topsy-turvy world of espionage and what’s real and what’s fantasy gets even harder to unpick, of course. I remember a back issue of Arcade magazine – God, I miss Arcade magazine – in which a real special forces person was asked to weigh in on Metal Gear Solid. Their cardboard box verdict? I’ve hidden under worse.

Who said Bruce Springsteen had to be The Boss? | Image credit: Eurogamer

Regardless, this mixture of realism and its opposite is a Kojima fixation. It’s here for life. It’s there waiting for you the moment you step off your futuristic bike in Death Stranding and grasp the baby in a flask around your neck, and then stumble, with a gorgeously recognisable human awkwardness, over mossy rocks.

And most hauntingly of all, perhaps, it was there during the making of another Metal Gear, Phantom Pain, in which Kojima’s team created a perfect model of one of their real meeting rooms in order to test out lighting and character models and, yes, how real things felt. Here’s Snake, tall as a real man, clad in leather and realistically lit by migrainey overhead office lighting, and yet for the first time I realised just how stylised he is, how perfect the angles of his grim face come together. He’s standing right in front of me, on the other side of the computer monitor at least, and yet he looks like an old seadog from Tintin or a Dick Tracy villain. And somewhere, is that Kojima laughing at it all?

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