Before the Future Disappeared
I've somehow gone twenty-five years without playing Metal Gear Solid 2. Earlier this year, I finally sat down with the first four games, and it's the one I haven't been able to stop thinking about since. It makes my head hurt, to be honest, and this little piece is my attempt to exorcise it from my brain.
The opening of this game, the Tanker chapter, feels like a confident roar of what the series was going to be from here on out. Before you even process all the new lore being dumped on your head or sneak past the guards or try to stop another Metal Gear, your mind is already in shock from the jump in graphical fidelity. This is a new generation of games - the future of games and maybe even the future itself, rendered through a PlayStation 2. The rain-soaked tanker drifting through New York Harbour makes one thing very clear from the get-go: this is where games are headed.
The rain, and everything it touches, are the first things I notice. It's impact against Snake’s camo suit, then his regular suit, as he pulls into mission mode. The floor of the tanker feels slippery from its reflectivity, the lights diffusing upon impact, while small puddles of water gather across it. You can almost feel the heaviness of the Tanker as it creaks, groans, and shifts with the waves and rain. The enemies feel more dangerous than before, being way more aware of their surroundings. They don’t even disappear when you take them out now. In the background, New York itself waits in the rain. It glows in the distance, impossibly calm against everything else happening around it. Permanent and confident. Only a few years earlier, a world like this had to be built based on the power of suggestion. A texture used to stand in for a surface, a sound effect for material.
Not here anymore - everything seems determined to insist upon itself, and every few steps I take in this level, there’s something new asking for my attention. Narrow corridors gleam with warm industrial lighting. You leave damp footprints as you enter the indoor area. Steam hisses from ruptured pipes. Lockers now contain supplies and photographs and open with surprising realism. The glass can now show bullet holes and damage. Bottles can now be shot down with your pistol. The ice cubes melt in real time. Buckets tumble over with the most convincing sound and weight. The watermelon frickin’ explodes when you shoot it. It all feels impossibly extravagant. Games can now include watermelons, buckets, and so many other things that were previously impossible.
What’s remarkable is how unnecessary almost all of it is. Snake could go through his mission in a perfectly static cargo ship, and the main chunks would still work the same way. Noticing the rain, shooting the bottles, admiring the shot glass aren’t mandatory, but the game almost wants me to notice it all. It seems less interested in taking down a Metal Gear than in inviting me to poke at everything around me. It wants me to stop and appreciate that someone, somewhere, thought about how an ice bucket should sound when shot across a table.
That someone wants me to know that the PlayStation 2 not only renders more polygons than before, but also offers a glimpse of what the future holds. That every limitation we’ve learned to accept can simply be solved with time and power. For one hour, it feels less like playing a new stealth game and more like stepping into the future - one that holds more. Snake is back. Metal Gear Solid is back. The PlayStation now has a 2 next to it, and everything is bigger, denser, and more convincing than ever before. If this is merely the opening chapter, things are only going to look up from here on out, an emotion that enraptured the turn of the millennium itself.
But then, we play as Raiden.
And the century truly showed itself.
And the future the world promised us simply disappeared.
...
Thank you for reading. The thing I love about playing older games is how they sometimes preserve a tomorrow that never came, a future that now remains frozen in time. Waiting quietly for someone to revisit them, like artefacts in a museum, I guess. This small piece was just my personal attempt to understand one of the greatest of them all from a distance.
Being honest, I was born well after the period and moment I’ve centred this piece on, so these thoughts don’t really come from personal memory. They’ve grown out of conversations I had with people who lived through it all, as well as my own thoughts on Metal Gear Solid 2. A small thanks to my dad, too, whose observation that films from that era imagined the future differently helped shape the idea I’ve explored here.
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