On this day 36 years ago, the second game from the Metal Gear series was launched in Japan, which sent us on a mission to Zanzibar Land.
It’s a strange story about how Metal Gear became a series. The original game was very successful, but primarily thanks to the port for the NES console, which creator Hideo Kojima did not work on. Konami therefore released a sequel to Metal Gear called Snake’s Revenge, also without Kojima’s involvement.
Snake’s Revenge was a fairly mediocre game that had nothing to do with Kojima’s Metal Gear vision and is not considered part of the main series today. However, Kojima eventually got the chance to deliver a proper sequel for the Japanese market, launching it today under the title Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.
The game once again put us in the role of a soldier under the fictitious name of Solid Snake. This time he was sneaking by the so-called Zanzibar Land to rescue the kidnapped scientist Kia Marv and face the walking nuclear tank Metal Gear D. In that adventure, Snake met the promising soldier Gray Fox, and at the end, a confrontation with Big Boss awaited him again. Or at least one of the versions of Big Boss.
Metal Gear 2 was stealth an adventure just like its predecessor, but much more advanced in terms of challenges. The greatest progress was achieved in the behavior of opponents who gained the sense of hearing, and could patrol several different zones, i.e. move between them. She was also creep ability introducedwhich became indispensable in later games.
In many ways, Metal Gear 2 laid the groundwork for subsequent sequels that made their way into the Western market. Kojima is well known for recycling ideas, and it was in Metal Gear Solid that he repeated a number of scenarios from this game, e.g. like following a female character into the toilet.
It’s been a long time Metal Gear 2 was only available in the Japanese marketexclusively on MSX2 computers there and only in Japanese. Unofficially, the game came to Europe at the end of the nineties, but we only got real access to it in 2006 as part of the Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence edition. Later, MG2 became available in the HD edition of MGS 3 for PS3, PSV and X360, and then it finally came to all current platforms as part of MGS Master Collection Vol. 1, and today it can also be purchased in a package with the original game, for 20 euros.
