Snake’s Revenge

“What Is Metal Gear? I Have Never Heard of It.”

“You’re a combination Rambo, James Bond, John Wayne, and Lawrence of Arabia.”
Top-secret art by @Edupatilla.

Solid Snake is dead. The Hind Ds have left the Heaven, the victims have been bled, red velvet lines the cardboard box, so on and so forth.^[♬] But in a cruel bit of injustice, his murderers have gotten off scot-free. I am of course referring to none other than Konami Holdings Corporation; the former games conglomerate turned pachinko peddlers. Konami is guilty of far more than just terminating some of its most beloved games franchises though, with far more serious charges related to their mistreatment of employees, attempts to discredit and stifle some of their star developers, and embarrassing bouts of mismanagement bordering on self-sabotage. In other words: They stink.

But Metal Gear is a franchise that has always existed sort of perpetually on the verge of death, what with Hideo Kojima himself wanting to retire the series for the better part of two decades. With each new installment in the series promised to be “his last,” Kojima has always demonstrated a desire to move on to new projects and to let sleeping snakes lie. Hell, even as early as the first game in the series, he had no immediate intention of producing a follow-up. It’s by a series of fortunate events that Kojima would be inspired to direct his own sequel — a series of events that would first see an alternate sequel developed entirely without his input.

Snake’s Revenge for the Nintendo Entertainment System released in North America in April of 1990. Despite being developed by a team within Konami of Japan, the game was never intended to be sold in its country of origin. Designed specifically with what Konami considered to be the tastes of the “Western market” in mind, it represents something like a divergence — an alternate path the franchise may have well traveled down, if Kojima had not stepped in to steer the series back on course. As a Metal Gear title developed without his supervision or even so much as based on one of his own ideas, the natural impulse of many of Kojima’s most ardent fans is to dismiss the game outright. But while it’s most certainly not canon, is that really sufficient grounds to write it off entirely?

Today, we aim to declassify this top-secret project, and uncover the shocking truths hidden within. We’ll order a sitrep on how this whole fiasco got started, proceed to the mission at hand, and recount the details of what happened after the game’s release in our debrief. So grab your guns, bring your bright red camo, and prepare to infiltrate the ‘FORTRESS FANATIC!’

“You Must Collect Information from Your Co-Workers.”

For those who may not know, the first Metal Gear was originally designed with the Microsoft MSX in mind — a line of microcomputers primarily intended for the Japanese market. As such, when the success of the game in its home territory indicated that it should be released internationally as well, it was necessary to convert it to more widely-available hardware for other regions of the world. Given that the year was 1987, Nintendo’s current console offering was the obvious first choice. Family Computer owners were able to experience the conversion come December 1987, while Nintendo Entertainment System enthusiasts would have to wait ‘til June of the following year to see it translated to English. Development duties for the conversion were tasked to a team within Konami’s Tokyo branch — not under Kojima’s purview.

The version of Metal Gear on Nintendo hardware has infamously been derided by Kojima, with him stating in interviews that “The care that I put in the original wasn’t there,”^[1] and that “Those who created the game had no sliver of appreciation for the players.”^[2] These complaints would seem to have less to do with the aesthetic changes or level layout differences, and more to do with possibly inadvertent changes to the overall balance and difficulty of the game. While the MSX original is certainly obtuse in several of its own rights – packed to the brim with hidden passages, insta-death traps, and the hell of keycard-swapping that comes with every locked door – the NES version ups the frustration in a few new ways with some frankly careless design: The placement of enemies can often be downright unfair, with detection being unavoidable in many scenarios. Pitfall traps can sometimes feel downright impossible to circumnavigate without the use of an exploit. The desert is now a more elaborate “Lost Woods”-style screen maze, except with no tells or hints to make navigating it anything other than guesswork. The list goes on.

On the other hand, there are also a number of concessions made that actually make the game more fair, by altering some of the more outright unfair designs from Kojima’s original vision: The nightmare that is the obnoxious “Spiral Room” with its half-dozen breakaway walls is mercifully missing. On that note, you no longer need to use C4 to reveal the hidden passages behind breakaway walls, as your fists will now suffice. Tricky-to-hit jetpacking enemies on the rooftops are now grounded, any alert can be rescinded by simply changing screens, and the three original buildings are now divided into five to allow for a less labyrinthian level of architecture. In having to adapt to the technically weaker hardware and omit certain features, I dare say the game generally feels more streamlined than its source material.

Perhaps one of the most notable omissions from the NES game is that of the titular Metal Gear itself, replaced instead with a supercomputer of sorts. Now, obviously, not being able to spar against the superweapon which the game itself is named after is a curious bit of design, and one which certainly is worthy of scrutiny. However, I’m going to drop a bit of a controversial take on all y’all: The original battle against Metal Gear sucked. It’s a fight against not the mech itself, but against two lasers mounted to the wall in order to protect it, while you’re made to plant bombs at its feet in a needlessly elaborate pattern that you would’ve had to have written down probably around an hour ago. I mean, how goofy is it that Metal Gear’s weak point is its feet of all things — and only when hit in an incredibly specific sequential order, somehow? At least in the process of blowing up the big computer on the NES, you can stick your C4 wherever you damn well please.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, Kojima isn’t infallible, and the NES conversion of Metal Gear isn’t completely irredeemable. The narrative that the lack of Kojima’s direction led the conversion completely astray is dismissive of the team who worked to repurpose the game for this new hardware, and the efforts they went to to try and rebalance the game for a new audience. It also sort of overlooks the fact that Metal Gear on NES was largely a critical and commercial success for Konami, with English-speaking consumers who “didn’t know any better” being plenty happy with the version of the game they received. As a matter of fact, it did so well in North America, that Konami decided to target an NES-exclusive sequel directly to that particular market — leaving Kojima out of the creative process yet again.

Now, you may be asking yourselves at this point, “Why did Konami try to shut Kojima out of his own franchise?” Well, it’s because Kojima was a part of the MSX division and not the NES division; simple as that. Developers within Konami were seen as specializing in specific hardware, and relegated to working on projects within that architecture, rather than having to be “re-trained” in order to develop for different consoles. You can see a precedent for this sort of business practice set with the development of Haunted Castle for arcades and Castlevania: The Adventure for Game Boy, where none of the development team from the mainline NES Castlevania entries crossed over to work on these projects. You can certainly argue that this approach led to a lack of consistency between games in a given franchise, but there’s also the counter-point to be made that this method allowed for fresh perspectives and more innovation within existing properties.

And so development began in Konami’s Kobe branch for what would be known as Snake’s Revenge; dropping the “Metal Gear” moniker entirely in favor of a more character-focused title. The impression that I get is that this was a decision made by the American localization team for marketing purposes, figuring that re-branding the game around its protagonist and tossing a buzzword like “Revenge” into the name may have well helped sales. That being said, I’ve heard people make the claim that by dropping the Metal Gear title, Konami was somehow trying to disassociate the game from the brand for fear that the sequel might tarnish it? But honestly, that’s just not how games publishing works: If Konami didn’t have faith in the game or the team behind it, they probably wouldn’t have put the game out to begin with. Or at the very least, they wouldn’t leave the references to Metal Gear intact.

Between designing the game with North America specifically in mind, leaving out Kojima, and generally wanting to iterate on the previous title, there would most certainly be some changes made to the gameplay formula. Come April of 1990, it was time for the new team to show what they were capable of, and to give North America a taste of Metal Gear entirely independent of its original creator. The result is a game which Kojima himself would concede “was very faithful to the Metal Gear concept.”^[1b] Try to remember that as we proceed.

“The Commander’s Only Weak Spot Is the Soles of His Feet.”

“Are you commando enough to handle this Kockamamie scheme?!”
North American box art.

Usually, I begin these portions of my reviews with a brief plot synopsis. The only problem this time around is, I don’t know which version of the story I should go with: The one told in all the advertising and in the game’s manual, or the story told by the game itself?

You see, Konami had established a label called ‘Ultra Games’ as a shell division operating out of North America, in order to bypass Nintendo’s publishing limitations on the NES. As a matter of fact, the first title credited to them was none other than the NES conversion of Metal Gear, which was also given an alternate story [from what is told in-game] as told in promotional material and in the game’s own packaging. Whatever team was responsible for marketing Konami’s games in the States took major creative liberties with the titles that passed through them, outright inventing plot points that never actually materialize in the games themselves.

In the case of the NES Metal Gear, their version of events would pit Solid Snake against the nefarious ‘Colonel Vermon CaTaffy’ — a pathetically weak attempt at parodying the name of real-life Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi. The back of the game’s box also references your primary radio contact as being one ‘Commander South,’ despite the fact that the game’s translation never once references anyone by that name throughout the course of the game. Obviously, Commander South is meant to refer to Big Boss (while also spoofing notable war criminal Oliver North), and Colonel CaTaffy is an invention by the marketing team likely created in order to give a face and a name to the enemy forces, rather than outright spoiling the reveal of Big Boss as the leader of Outer Heaven. But with the success of Metal Gear in North America, and players more likely to connect with the story as told in the game itself, there’s really no reason Konami / Ultra would need to maintain this weird alternate continuity.

… Except, of course, they did. After licensing out a 120-page novel in the Nintendo ‘Worlds of Power’ book series using the same goofy character names,^[3] it was determined that this “continuity” was going to continue to be the way these games were marketed in the States. And so, the story told in advertising for Snake’s Revenge sees Colonel CaTaffy escaping Outer Heaven to continue his reign of terror. After losing everything, he’s described as going “psycho,” and as having retaliated against Snake by killing his two best friends. Now on the run, he aligns himself with fellow bad guy Ayatollah Khomeini ‘Higharolla Kockamamie,’ and takes refuge in his ally’s base of operations: The Fortress Fanatic. As repayment for this safe haven, the Colonel gifts his new friend his ultimate weapon, given the terrifying moniker of the ‘Ultra-Sheik Nuclear Attack Tank!’ Naturally, it’s up to Snake to save the world once again; only this time, it’s personal.

So, that’s pretty funny and all (and by “funny,” I mean trite and kind of racist), but what’s the real plot? A far more straightforward affair, as it turns out: Three years after the Outer Heaven incident of Metal Gear, an unknown terrorist group has taken over a factory made to mass-produce Metal Gears. Now a lieutenant, Solid Snake is tasked with leading a three-man FOX-HOUND unit into the facility, located in some unspecified region in the Middle East. His team consists of former Navy sailor John Turner and former Marine Nick Myer on the ground, an unnamed chopper pilot serving as your primary contact and coordinator, and later Jennifer (returning from the first game) as a double agent on the inside. No mention is ever made in-game of Snake losing his best friends or seeking any sort of personal retribution.

The story will see Snake deploying into a forest at nightfall, infiltrating a vague facility, boarding a boat carrying a bevy of Metal Gears, before eventually dropping off in the desert, taking a train, and sneaking into the final fortress; where the enemy commander and a prototype Metal Gear Mk. II lay in wait. The attempt is definitely made here to pack as much environmental variety into the game as was possible, and to make the mission feel “bigger” than the original. And technically speaking, it’s most certainly a larger game in terms of pure scale, albeit with a major caveat: It’s no longer an “open world” so much as it is a linear-driven adventure, where every new setting cuts you off from tracking back to the last. This is honestly fine by me, as I find the chore of remembering every last locked door and backtracking to practically the beginning of the game on a semi-regular basis to be quite tedious at times.

Along the way, the game attempts to toss a gratuitous number of twists at you — clearly inspired by the shocking reveal of Big Boss as the villain of the first game. In fact, they must’ve figured it was a twist so nice, they had to do it twice; as Big Boss returns once again to serve as the final boss of Snake’s Revenge! Not only that, but he’s also a cyborg now, transforming into something like the robotic form of a Terminator mid-way through his battle!! Also, your teammate John turns out not to be the real John Turner after all, but is actually an impostor meant to sabotage your mission!!! As if that weren’t enough, Nick gets killed in action after revealing that Jennifer isn’t just a double agent, but rather a triple agent or something?! Except maybe actually a quadruple agent, since she still goes on to help you at the end?!? They don’t really explain that last particular point all too well.

Look, let’s be honest here: The original Metal Gear wasn’t so hot when it came to compelling plot, and neither is Snake’s Revenge. It was really with Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake that Kojima cranked up the narrative storytelling and started injecting elements of political intrigue into his writing. At this point though, the story was sort of just there to make the games feel more like a movie, where at least a modicum of motivation for the protagonist and one or two secrets to be revealed are usually required. That being said, Snake’s Revenge twists and turns a little too much in the pursuit of “plot twists for plot twists’ sake,” and would’ve been better served with something more straightforward along the lines of Bionic Commando. That, or it needed to fully embrace its spy thriller theme, and model itself more after Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode or The Mafat Conspiracy.** As it stands, it’s too weak a story to be engaging, and yet it is so packed with twists as to come across as convoluted.

What does remain largely intact from the original is the top-down perspective gameplay, where Snake is made to navigate from screen to screen holding two weapons (one melee, one firearm / explosive) and a piece of equipment. Notable additions to your potential arsenal include ‘Power Armor’ allowing you to move some small number of rocks and boulders, an ‘X-ray Detector’ to highlight breakaway walls, and ‘Truth Gas’ which we’ll come back to later; plus a shotgun and a combat knife in the weapons department. In exchange, you lose the iconic cardboard box, as well as swapping out the grenade launcher for standard frag grenades. Naturally, there are also a number of one-function items that will clog up your inventory until the literal single instance they actually serve a purpose. These include a ‘Bugging Kit’ which the manual describes as “inspired by Watergate,” a ‘Smoke Bomb’ to signal your helicopter in a key moment, and a ‘Dry Cell’ which powers your transceiver back on when it is scripted to run out of battery at the beginning of the third act.

Maybe this is just a pet peeve of mine, but I think that one-function items are a bit of bad game design? If you’re going to go through the effort of programming a gadget or device into the game and allocating a spot on the inventory screen for it, you may as well use it in your game more than just the once. I can think of like, a half dozen spots where the bugging kit alone could’ve proven useful, letting you listen into conversations that clue you in to more hints for the endgame. The smoke bomb could be outright replaced by the flare gun for the purpose it serves in the game, and the dry cells could’ve been a recurring resource that you use in order to power the radar function on your transceiver. Which, hey, there’s another bit of wasteful design I need to address!

According to guides online, the radar function of your transceiver is only utilized twice over the course of the game. This is news to me, as I found only one screen where it actually comes into play; when you’re made to escape an exploding freighter by navigating to a specific screen as highlighted on the radar. Outside of this instance, navigating to the radar tab of your transceiver will just show an empty grid with no other waypoints or blips. Again: Going through all the effort as a developer to design and implement this radar screen, only to use it in your several-hours long game just one or two times? Aside from just being a total waste of time and resources, it also puts the burden on the player of wanting to access the menu and try in vain to use it in every instance where they may so much as suspect it might come into play. Some poor sap out there probably checked every last screen in the entire game to see if the radar had any other uses, only to be massively disappointed.

In the grand scheme of things, these are admittedly minor nitpicks. The problem is, they’re small flaws that are indicative of larger, more pressing design issues. And to be clear here, several of these are carryovers from the original game — present as early as the MSX release, and not addressed until years later in the franchise history in some cases. These would include issues such as having to exit and re-enter rooms over and over again in order to stock up on replenishable resources, often having to go through every last keycard in your inventory to figure out which ones work on which doors, and screen transitions wherein it is impossible to avoid detection unless you know in advance exactly which pixel-precise spot you need to enter from. What’s frustrating is how easily fixable these particular annoyances are: Have all pickups immediately top you off, newer keycards outright replace older ones, and… just, maybe have thought about where enemies should appear relative to the edges of the screens?

Perhaps one of the most notable design “flaws” to carry over from the previous iteration is the fact that enemies can still only see what is directly in their straight-line line of sight. I put “flaws” in sort of non-committal quotation marks there because some will argue that this primitive level of AI suits the game just fine, and that giving the baddies peripheral vision would be an over-complication of what should be kept as a simple game. On the other hand, what’s arguably the biggest [mechanical] improvement made by the true Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, released the very same year? I’d argue that it was the complete overhaul of guard patrol routines and their ability to detect Snake, complete with the ability to turn their heads to their left and right. In the three years since the first installment, there should have been some more meaningful iterations to the core stealth action formula here. Instead, you get only a couple of additional items and features that feel like they barely make an effort to move things forward.

For starters, there’s the addition of ‘Truth Gas’: An item which allows you to get information out of enemy officers, who are meant to provide more pointed hints and advice than the standard hostages. If you approach one of them without the gas at the ready, they’ll just stand in place and feign ignorance, whereas having it on-hand will convince them to spill the beans. In this sense, the officers are basically the same as the standard hostages you find scattered about the game, except they’re gated by an item in order to be effectively utilized. That said, their information is never particularly vital, and the primary motivation you’ll have to interrogate them and rescue hostages is to increase your all-important ‘Rank.’

Yes, returning from the first game in the system by which your health and inventory capacity increase as you earn points for interacting with those non-hostile NPCs. And make no mistake: This isn’t just an optional activity. Upgrading rank to at least four out of a new total of six stars is a necessity, as facilitated by points in the game where you are required to be able to bring and hold large quantities of given items. In the first game, you needed to gain and maintain rank in order to open communication with Jennifer / obtain some vital items and information, as well as needing to be able to hold a certain number of mines for the battle against Metal Gear itself. In Snake’s Revenge however, it eventually resolves in very frustrating bit of gatekeeping, which tests your ability to hold nearly the maximum quantity of rations and ‘Oxygen Tanks.’ It comes to a head during one of the most infamous new features in the game: The horizontal view sections.

No longer can the action be contained within just the traditional top-down view, thereby necessitating sequences wherein Snake is controlled as if he were a character in a side-scrolling shooter. Perhaps these sections were inspired by the success of Contra for Konami, with the thought that Snake’s Revenge should embrace more action-oriented gameplay? The problem is, the game doesn’t go all the way with it, still miring it under some remaining stealth game contrivances. You’re still meant to keep a low profile – ducking behind steps and taking out guards discreetly – lest you alert the whole cavalry of your presence. And in this mode, doing so can well mean certain death, as there is far less room to dodge and escape shots. Not to mention, most of these sections also contain copious amounts of water to wade through, which is electrified when the alarm is raised. And by that point, you may as well just shock yourself to death and start over, since you’re meant to spend so much time in the drink.

The absolute worst of this is when submerging underwater is paired with planting C4 on pillars — which, since you’re relegated to a side view, you have no other way of circumnavigating. Of course, this is where Oxygen Tanks come into play, as every second spent underwater eats away at your oxygen reserves. And believe me, that air runs out fast — ticking away the second Snake’s head hits the water. Come close to the end of the game, there is a segment that requires you to not only max out how many tanks you’re carrying, but to also have a handful of rations on top of that in order to cover the health you’ll be losing when you inevitably run out of your air reserves. All the while, you’re busting your way through four screens of underwater submersion and blowing up pillars, with every second spent consuming resources feeling like an eternity. And again: If you’re not max rank (or close to it) at this point, you’re screwed. You’ll expend every last resource and drown before you make it to the other side, and thanks to the inability to backtrack past a certain point, you may be left having to enter an hours-old password or start the whole game over.

Between the constant risk of drowning, obnoxiously placed booby traps, and enemies who will spot you the second you transition between screens; the designs for these sections don’t come across as being particularly well thought out. It’d be one thing if the core shooting and jumping and such was fun, but sadly, it’s all implemented in the most haphazard of manners. For one, all those extra weapons you collect over the course of the game don’t apply here: You’re relegated entirely to your handgun, knife, and C4. Oh, and that handgun of yours can only fire in a straight line directly in front of you, making it woefully inept at dealing with enemies above or below you. This rule of course doesn’t apply to enemies, who can angle their shots in any direction they so please. Hell, some of them even get jetpacks that make them nearly impossible to hit, further adding to the fun of combat in this perspective.

What’s especially frustrating about this is that Snake can clearly be seen holding a rifle in all his frames of animation, rather than the handgun he’s actually meant to be firing. So, I’m lead to believe that these sections were probably originally designed with the variety of weapons in mind? Which means these sections of the game were either designed incredibly hastily, or made deliberately that much more difficult by restricting your weaponry. That, or no one cared to inform the graphic artists of the finalized mechanics for these stages. All in all, these side-view sections are zero fun to play, add nothing of value to the game, and become only more loathsome as you progress through the story. For the credibility of the programmers involved, I hope these were an inclusion they were forced to make at Konami’s request, rather than their own original idea to add.

What this really indicates to me is a fundamental misunderstanding of what made the original Metal Gear successful in the first place, because boy howdy lemme tell you: It hardly had anything to do with the action. We’re talking about a game here where the shooting and general control were serviceable at best, and stiff as stale dog shit at worst. And it’s not really the stealth that caught on quick either, considering how primitive it was even back then.*** No, what attracted people to the original Metal Gear was the fact that it invoked the “cryptic design” trends that were popular in games of the era, and actually managed to make some sense of them. It took the complete and utter obtuseness of a Solomon’s Key or Milon’s Secret Castle and turned it down about a dozen notches — grounding it in a sense of “realism” and architectural logic. A player may have banged their head against the wall trying to find invisible items in the likes of Super Pitfall, but Metal Gear was far more straightforward by comparison: Just tricky enough to make you feel like a super sleuth spy, while also being entirely solvable without having to buy a back-issue of Nintendo Power.

And so, Snake’s Revenge demonstrates its misunderstanding by re-focusing the game almost entirely around its clunky action; leaving the half-baked stealth mechanics as exploitable as ever, and making sure that anything the developers thought may have served to potentially confuse or befuddle players is explained to you by no less than two or three different hostages and transceiver communications. Sure, there are still oversights such as poorly telegraphed destructible sandbags hiding necessary routes for progression, or not fully signalling to players some vital items for completion, but you can tell that these are the result of bad design rather than intentional puzzle-making. By cutting out the bulk of the backtracking and architectural quirks, you’re left with just a stiffly-controlling, barely-stealthy, mostly-straightforward shooter. To be clear, I consider these downgrades rather than just lateral moves.

If I could make an action movie comparison here (I feel like Kojima certainly wouldn’t mind), Snake’s Revenge is very much akin to Die Hard 2. The publisher or production company notes the success of the original installment, but decides to put a new rear-end in the director’s chair. And in the pursuit of upping profits and making a name for themselves, all this new director can think to do is to further “up the stakes” — taking the action outside of just one location, and trimming out most of the non-action scenes. And while that may make sense on paper and seem to appeal to a broader audience, it sort of overlooks the fact that the originally smaller scale and stretches of downtime are what made the original so special in the first place.

When it comes to the [top-down] action, you can at least make the argument that it is – in fact – slightly improved. There’s a larger variety of enemies requiring different sorts of approaches and strategies, the shotgun with its spread-fire fills a hole from the original arsenal, and the level design lends itself to more open screens with better opportunities for dodging and angling. All that being said, it still behooves you to avoid setting off alerts where you can; not because it’s particularly difficult to clear a screen of enemies, but because the combat still feels more like a chore than anything. On that note, you may find yourself largely relying on your silent melee weapons in your fists and your knife — with the fist taking a couple more hits to subdue enemies, but allowing the chance for items to drop as they are dispatched. The silenced pistol is also a fine option, but I found it more satisfying to silently stab my way through most of the game, even if the janky stealth mechanics meant some unforeseen / unavoidable detection.

Yes, as mentioned earlier: Returning from the NES Metal Gear are screen transitions leading you directly into the line of sight of enemies and other security measures. As early as the opening section of the game, you’re made to navigate through a jungle in the process of infiltrating the enemy base, with screens of complete darkness illuminated only by a scarce few moving searchlights. And of course, these searchlights often run along the edges of the screen, where you are made to enter and exit from. Oh, and those entrances are often quite narrow, meaning you only have so many pixels of width to approach them from. Are you beginning to see what could go wrong here? Sure enough, there will undoubtedly be instances where you cross over into the next screen only to be immediately struck by the searchlight, triggering a full-on alert where you are assailed by ground troops or tricky-to-hit airborne enemies — both of whom make very short work of you this early in the game.

Add to that the frustratingly frequent instances of enemies staring directly at spots you’re made to emerge from, projectiles and explosions that seem to be undodgeable, and other instances where you have literally no choice but to take damage; and you’re left with a game that really doesn’t seem to pay much consideration to its players. I’m reminded of the gas chamber rooms from both versions of the original Metal Gear; where you need to use a keycard to gain entry to them, occupy your equipment slot in the process, and thereby force you to take at least one point of damage before you can strap your gas mask on. Of course, this bad trap mechanic returns in Snake’s Revenge… only this time, you don’t even get the courtesy of having a gas mask. Instead, you’re simply made to munch on rations while choking to death on poison, all while laying a ridiculous amount of C4 explosives on barricades that block entry to the exits of these rooms. These are the sorts of rooms that I imagine bringing blind playthroughs to an end entirely. I mean, after the first four blocks of C4 you detonate don’t seem to have any effect on these barriers, what’s to make you think that the fifth will finally be the one to do the trick?

There’s also the matter of bosses, whose attacks are often completely and entirely unavoidable. Of the six encounters I would consider as being boss battles, I count three of them which are literally impossible to not take severe damage during the course of them, requiring you to be packed to the gills with rations. In example: As early as the first boss fight, you’re made to face against what I can only describe as a squad of football players, who run at you in formation to tackle and damage you. Given the dimensions of the room and your lack of effective movement control, there is no way to avoid their attacks until you whittle down their numbers some. I dare say that this might be the most difficult boss battle I’ve ever played in a Metal Gear game? In any case, it almost certainly feels like an unfair fight — as if it was designed as another attempt at gate-keeping / checking your inventory, rather than as a properly skill-testing encounter. Same goes for the battle against Big Boss’ cyborg form, where the winning strategy is to stand directly in front of him and take massive damage while detonating the dozens of mines at his feet needed to defeat him.

Funnily enough, the final battle against the Ultra-Sheik Nucl… err, ‘Metal Gear 2,’ is a super simple affair; where you all you need to do is stand in place and launch guided missiles through an air duct, in order to blow up the bipedal nuclear platform from an adjacent room. There’s nothing there to attack you, and your only hurdles to overcome are a ticking clock, a series of closing panels in the vents, and your own foresight in bringing enough missiles with you to get the job done. It’s certainly an anticlimactic end, but it also pretty much keeps in line with the previous iterations of Metal Gear having completely underwhelming encounters with the weapon of mass destruction itself. And at the same time, it’s a battle that requires you to have tracked down a somewhat out-of-the-way item (the Smoke Bomb) maybe an hour ago in order to even open up the route to it — rendering your checkpoint after the Big Boss battle unsalvageable and the game unbeatable if you don’t already have the item on-hand.

Scenarios like this just come across as mean design for the purpose of mean design, rather than just blundering on the part of developers not fully thinking things through. It leaves the game in an odd state where you’re left guessing at which design decisions made the developers were intentionally cruel, and which ones were just the product of inexperience or oversights. At least in the original Metal Gear for MSX, you get the sense that every obstacle and inconvenience is carefully calculated, resulting in a game designed with challenge in mind. Metal Gear for NES takes this existing format and makes a few tweaks of its own to it, in the hopes of making it just slightly more accessible. Snake’s Revenge, on the other hand, just feels like a confused mess; attempting to distill that original concept down even further in the pursuit of making the game simpler, but blundering its way into being an altogether more frustrating title by a series of inventory checks and DPS races.

All this made me very curious about how Kojima claims that he “was unable to infiltrate the base even once” in the NES Metal Gear,^[2b] yet presumably managed to clear the far harder Snake’s Revenge (or at least play enough of it to declare that he prefers it)? Honestly, I doubt that this is an issue that any other player would claim to suffer. And that’s where it finally hit me — the truth behind this whole stupid conspiracy of sorts: Kojima is a petulant egomaniac. Granted, that’s not really a fresh revelation in itself. Even as someone who loves the games this man has produced, it’s one of those things you just have to realize and accept at a certain point. But this is a fairly special case right here: This is Kojima refusing to accept any constructive criticism on his original vision, and pointing interested parties towards a bleak vision of an alternate, dystopian future for Metal Gear without his brilliant guidance. I am contending that Kojima recognized Snake’s Revenge as the Metal Gear Survive of its time — as a vision for Metal Gear’s future without his guiding hand.

I refuse to believe that Kojima is physically incapable of beating the NES conversion of Metal Gear, so much as that he refuses to do so. He absolutely loathes the idea of someone altering one of his creative visions in any way or measure, and it’s his natural reaction to reject suggested improvements or alterations. But Snake’s Revenge wasn’t his baby: It’s not an original concept or idea of his. Rather, it’s a game that’s certainly derivative of his previous ideas, but with none of the nuance or personality that he would employ if it were given to him to create. It’s the soulless, emptied husk of a Metal Gear game, as occupied by an entirely inferior product. And in that sense, it’s perfect for the purpose of Kojima being able to point to it and say something like “You see? This is what happens when I’m not involved.” In that sense, he would have no problem with “endorsing” it and directing curious fans towards it, setting them up for a vastly inferior experience.

What makes this whole mess that much more frustrating is the fact that – buried underneath the burden of continuing the Metal Gear franchise – Snake’s Revenge is a largely competent video game. Hell, in certain regards, it’s actually quite good! The presentation is above average for the NES, the premise is more involved than most other titles of the era, and the underlying structure surpasses a bulk of the console library in terms of uniqueness and variety. To that last point, the game obviously fails maximize on the full potential of that structure, but you can at least tell that an effort was made here to set the game apart from other bog-standard action-adventure fare. And while gameplay is arguably the most important aspect that a game should set out to nail, there’s still some merit to be mentioned in other aspects of the design.

Folks will mock and moan about Solid Snake’s bright-red combat garb sticking out against every environment in the game, but they’re sort of missing the point that… well, that’s the whole point of it. The original MSX Metal Gear certainly suffered from instances where the olive drab-clad Snake [and other NPCs] blended in almost too well with dull, grimy backdrops, whereas the NES conversion of the same game can only be described as “blindingly green” for the majority of its playtime. All in all, Snake’s Revenge is a far more colorful and vibrant game than the original, without crossing the line into becoming gaudy or overly-bright. You can certainly make the argument that the originally intended grimy greens and greys might’ve suited the series a bit better, but I for one appreciate wider ranges of colors and textures in my games. There’s also a far larger variety of settings, tilesets, and types of enemies; all contributing to a game that feels altogether more graphically impressive and diverse.

Snake’s Revenge also boasts a far better soundtrack than the original game, in my opinion — featuring a larger number of musical tracks and better taking advantage of the NES sound chip. Moving away from the almost minimalist soundtrack of the originals, Snake’s Revenge hits you with pounding drums, walking basslines, and highly elaborate instrumental sequencing. The iconic “Theme of Tara” (the main theme of the original Metal Gear) sees a particularly bouncy rendition here as the background music for the initial ‘Jungle Base’ area, serving as the only returning composition from the first game. All the rest of the tracks are originals composed by one Tsutomu Ogura. His style here seems to lean heavily on awesomely punchy drum samples, and in a strange way it really worked to motivate me to creep up on baddies and deliver good ol’ gut punches to dispatch them. I’ll pick the “Metal Gear Missile Launch” theme as my personal favorite track, for the way it manages to pump you up and convey urgency, and also for its stellar drum fills.

There’s also something to be said for the number of “action set piece” moments in the game, which work to indicate the direction that the franchise would move towards in the near future. When one of the most kinetic moments in the original game is simply parachuting down from a rooftop, it’s nice to see moments in Snake’s Revenge that feel like proper action movie staples: Clinging to the top of an aerial tram as you cross between buildings, escaping an exploding shipping freighter by helicopter, being chased from room to room by a cyborg twice your size, and so on. Sure, it all may play clunkily in actual execution, but with more focus on action, these are the sorts of scenes and scenarios you want to experience in a game of this nature. Where the original Metal Gear placed an emphasis on subtlety, Snake’s Revenge has you dodging homing missiles launched out of the mouths of marble statues. That’s ridiculousness on a level that Metal Gear wouldn’t really begin to embrace until around the point of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. But when the franchise finally made that leap, it certainly never backed down from it.

All that being said, Snake’s Revenge suffers greatly under the symptoms of “sequel burden” — weighed down by the history of a previous, well-loved game. If it could’ve been its own standalone title, freed from the association with its predecessor and the subsequent titles to follow… well, it still wouldn’t really be all that great a game, truth be told? But at the very least, it would’ve probably still have managed to stand out in the NES library for its more unique ideas and completely disorganized execution. It could’ve occupied a nice little slot for itself as one of those games you vaguely remember renting from Blockbuster as a kid based on the box art alone; struggling to put a name to it decades later, until seeing it pop up on some YouTube countdown of “forgotten games,” and physically feeling the recollection crash down over you. Maybe that isn’t the most glamorous spot for a game to occupy, but it’s still a rung above it being largely remembered as just a disappointing sequel.

I don’t assign ratings to games I write about on this site. For me, it feels weird trying to account for outside factors such as “historical significance” and “ironic enjoyment” and all that other stuff that comes up when talking about older, generally less well-regarded games. That said, I do occasionally have a sort of number in my head for what I might theoretically score games: Something like a five-star scale, graded on the nebulous metric of “entertainment for any and all reasons.” It’s usually pretty easy for me to toss out a number based on that criteria and feel fairly confident about it. But when it comes to Snake’s Revenge, I’m honestly completely stuck on it. I absolutely cannot make up my mind as to whether it would get a two or a three. On the one hand, it’s tedious, frustratingly-designed, and a marked step down from a well-established previous entry in a series. But on the other, it’s ambitious in a way that compelled me to play through it a second time — almost immediately after clearing it for the first, no less. The fact that I’ve spent so much time even thinking about this completely meaningless decision at least makes one thing very clear to me: Snake’s Revenge is an experience that will continue to stick with me for quite some time to come. That’s gotta count for something.

** I honestly adore both Golgo 13 games on the NES. That being said, you better believe that Top Secret Episode is due for an article on this site at some point.

*** I’m using Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein as my points of comparison here — released in ‘81 and ‘84 respectively. Metal Gear briefly flirts with the idea of disguising yourself in an enemy uniform for literally one screen, but the original Wolfenstein games made disguises one of their central mechanics. Among other features they held over Metal Gear also include risk of detection by guards discovering the corpses of their comrades, the ability to move said corpses out of view, and the option to bribe guards into not setting off alarms.

“The UN Declared World Peace Day.”

“If the world ends tomorrow, it’s all your fault.”
North American magazine ad.

From what I can gather, Snake’s Revenge seemed to have sort of just came and went on its North American release. It was given a three-page feature / partial walkthrough in the fourteenth issue of Nintendo Power,^[4] but never went on to be rated or reviewed by the editors. In fact, outside of a single mention in an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly that gives away a password to take you to the final level,^[5] I failed to find much other coverage of mention of the release at all! A full-page magazine ad for the game co-promoting it along with Super C apparently appeared in several games magazines and comic books, but good luck tracking down where exactly it was actually printed. And while I couldn’t find any definitive sales figures, I can at least report that the game never surfaced in Nintendo Power’s ‘Power Charts’ (their attempt to chart the most popular Nintendo titles on a month-to-month basis without actually revealing precious sales data). With that in mind, the fact that it failed to chart above the likes of more niche titles in The Chessmaster or Jack Nicklaus’ 18 Greatest Holes of Major Championship Golf on the ‘Dealers’ Picks’ lists indicates to me that it wasn’t quite a smash hit.

Failing to find so much as a single review score surfacing from the year of its release, I had to fast forward two years to 1992 when the game finally saw release in PAL regions. Unfortunately, even at this stage, I couldn’t actually find a review written or translated into English, leaving only a mixed batch of numerical review scores to show for my efforts. Averaging together MobyGames’ collection of European magazine scores from the era, I came up with something like an average score of 66 out of 100. Not a particularly impressive average, needless to say. And so, for all of Konami’s talk of targeting the game toward the so-called Western market, it seemed as if nobody on this side of the world was particularly receptive to it.

I feel like it may have all come down to a matter of timing: At the same time that Snake’s Revenge was slated to hit shelves, Konami had other games from some of their more established franchises to promote. Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse was beginning to receive heavy coverage in Nintendo Power and other publications, Super C quickly outclassed and outsold the game it had been made to be dual-advertised with in magazine ads, and the conversion of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game to the NES was all but guaranteed to be a millions-seller for them. At some point, Konami envisioned a ceiling for how successful Snake’s Revenge could be, and budgeted their promotional resources accordingly. It sounds strange to say it, but there just wasn’t room for a Metal Gear game in the North American market at that time.

But of course, North America is just one market, and Konami had a domestic market they considered as independent from their business overseas. Now, there was probably a plan initially in place to measure the success of Snake’s Revenge in the West before determining whether or not they would subsequently release the game in Japan on the Famicom. But as it turned out – before the game would even hit shelves in America – Kojima was already back to work on developing a new Metal Gear title for the MSX2, developed specifically with the Eastern market in mind by contrast. And if you take Kojima at his word, he may have never revisited his signature franchise if not for a chance encounter on a train.

“When I was in this MSX division, this one guy in the Famicom division developed Snake’s Revenge without talking to me or anybody else. One day this guy and I hopped on a train (the Tokyo transit system) together. We were talking to each other, and he says, ‘By the way, I’m developing this game called Snake’s Revenge, but I know it’s not the authentic Snake, so please create a new Snake game of your own.’ That was when I decided to create Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.” ~ Hideo Kojima^[1c]

So, this story as repeated by Kojima certainly has some holes to it. For one, Kojima (or his translator) makes it sound like Snake’s Revenge was somehow developed entirely in secret, with Kojima completely unaware that Konami was iterating on the franchise he gave birth to. Now, for as disorganized and shrouded in secrecy a company as Konami may have been, I honestly have a hard time buying this? Simply put, Kojima had no other projects he was directly involved in at the time, with Snatcher having already released in 1988 and his again not having any hand in the development of SD Snatcher due for release in 1990. I guess we’re just meant to assume he was being paid to twiddle his thumbs rather than being actively assigned to any projects by his employer, as well as being completely oblivious to the goings-on in other departments? Also, are we really meant to be believe that Konami hadn’t / wouldn’t consider calling on him to develop another Metal Gear title for the MSX if [and when] Snake’s Revenge fell through? All I’m saying here is, Kojima may not be the most reliable narrator in recounting his own life’s story.

The real key take-away from this story is that Kojima set to work on Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake before Snake’s Revenge had finished development, and had it ready just a short few months after the release of the latter. The game would launch exclusively in Japan on July 20th of 1990, immediately top MSX Magazine’s rankings for the top-selling games on the console (where it would remain for six months), and quickly establish itself as the true game to succeed Metal Gear. It feels almost unnecessary to explain that it not only improved on the original game in almost every conceivable regard, but also far surpassed Snake’s Revenge in terms of iteration and quality. What I find worth noting is that it doubled down on the obtuse puzzles and hidden paths as seen in the original game, in stark contrast to the streamlined Snake’s Revenge. Let that demonstrate again what the appeal of the original games in the series truly was.

From here, fans of the Metal Gear franchise know the rest of the story: Metal Gear Solid comes out and acknowledges the continuity of Metal Gear 2 over Snake’s Revenge, filling out the details of the MSX2 title that the North American and European markets missed out on via info and exposition dumps in the game. Not only that, but Metal Gear Solid proceeds to repeat several of the same set pieces and beats from its MSX2 predecessor — almost as if to make up for the fact that players outside Japan never got to experience them the first time around. All the while, Snake’s Revenge is completely buried in the franchise chronology, and made to be forgotten as quickly as possible while the brand continues to grow and prosper. And so, Konami seems to learn their lesson about taking Metal Gear out of Kojima’s hands… at least, for a good long while.

I’d be remiss here not to mention another Metal Gear sequel released around this time, which bears a few similarities to Snake’s Revenge (albeit back under the direct supervision of Kojima himself): 2000’s Metal Gear: Ghost Babel for the Game Boy Color, as confusingly released under the title of Metal Gear Solid in North America. In addition to being packed to the gills with content and probably being the best Game Boy Color game ever released, it’s also notable for its premise, which again sees an alternate timeline that diverges after the events of the original Metal Gear. In the same way that Snake’s Revenge writes its own history after the events of “Operation Intrude N313,” Ghost Babel follows a reclusive Solid Snake forced back into action seven years after completing his most infamous mission — forgoing the events of Metal Gear 2. Also similarly to Snake’s Revenge, the game is structured as more of a straightforward progression; being broken up across thirteen stages, and cutting off your ability to backtrack past certain points. Of course, Ghost Babel is a far more tightly-designed game, and never makes it so that you can completely screw yourself out of completing the game for failing to collect an item you can’t go back for. Novel concept.

As we all well know, the good times could only roll on so long, before the 2015 debacle surrounding Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain would see Hideo Kojima part ways with Konami and the franchise he spent the better part of thirty years bringing to cultural prominence. And so, players soon found themselves facing the prospect of a Metal Gear not directed by Kojima — guided instead entirely by the corporate motive of a company who seem all but entirely disinterested by the prospect of continuing to make video games. Which brings us to Metal Gear Survive: Konami’s desperate attempt to recoup the exorbitant cost of producing Phantom Pain by re-using its engine and assets for the purposes of a zombie survival game. In case you didn’t already know, this game did not go over well! It was pretty much doomed from the get-go – even before it turned out that the game would underwhelm in every regard – as consumers had long since decided that they had no interest in a Metal Gear game lacking involvement by Kojima.

It’s a simultaneous arrogance and ignorance on the part of Konami in proceeding to develop Metal Gear Survive, with a complete and utter failure to understand what defined Metal Gear even as late as the year 2018. In the same way that Snake’s Revenge learned the wrong lessons from Metal Gear before it, Survive presumes that the Fox Engine and its associated mechanics were what made Phantom Pain at least a partial success. Of course, it’s obvious to determine now that it had less to do with the core combat / stealth mechanics or the half-baked resource management, and almost everything to do with the creative opportunities and solutions for completing missions that players are able to come up with thanks to the context of the open world. Survive is a game where every combat encounter is best handled by climbing on top of a box and poking a spear into the crowds of mindless zombies that gather below you.

As Snake’s Revenge’s reputation as the black sheep of the franchise seems to have been usurped by Metal Gear Survive, one naturally has to wonder about the future of the Metal Gear franchise, and if Konami will somehow manage to top themselves in producing an even worse title in the passionless pursuit of profits. And while there’s a part of me that harbors a perverse fascination in seeing how much worse things can get, there’s obviously still the fan in me that wishes to see the series come back with something truly special — something that conveys that the sense of passion that me and many others have gotten hooked on, mixed with maybe a little of that good ol’ cryptic design we’re all apparently suckers for. We can only hope that one day, a Gray Fox will appear to cast the black sheeps back in the shade.

[1] ^{b c} Kent, Steven. “Hideo Kojima: Game Guru, Movie Maniac.” Gamers Today. Circa 1999~2000. Web. (Archive)
[2] ^b “Kojima despises MGS NES, doesn’t mind Snake’s Revenge […].” Nintendo Everything. June 27, 2011. Web.
[3] Packwood, Lewis. “The Metal Gear Novelisation is Super Weird.” Kotaku UK. July 21, 2015. Web.
[4] “Snake’s Revenge.” Nintendo Power, Volume 14. July 1990. Print.
[5] “Tricks of the Trade.” Electronic Gaming Monthly, Issue 13. August 1990. Print.