Earlier today, I posted a comment on USGamer.net --a very cool website that's been publishing a lot of my work over the last few months (all of which will renew your faith in whatever you lost faith in)-- that ran along the lines of what you're about to read. After a little more thought, though, I've decided to expand on that because of how important this particular moment in history really is for me. I guess we can couple this with that monstrous write up on Final Fantasy X I did a little while back as another nerd compass-altering moment in my life. Anyway...
In about four hours, which would be midnight Eastern time, Metal Gear Solid V will have completed downloading and will be unlocked for my verbose cut scene-watching pleasure (as if I could stay awake for any of them at that point). As the media has been reporting close to nonstop for months now, this will absolutely be series director Hideo Kojima's final game in a franchise he's shepherded for 25ish years now, and will (maybe) bring the nutty sci-fi saga of a group of cloned soldiers and their genetic "father" to a close.
Equally nutty is how buying this game for me was far from a no-brainer with what I'm about to tell you. I soured on the series a bit over time, and Kojima's quirks and odd personal obsessions have gone from charming, if a little obtuse over the years to grating and often childish. I agree that he's a very intelligent guy that's done some really great things, but having nearly absolute control over that which he had made was slowly turning Metal Gear into a shell of itself. But that's an argument for another time.
What's important is this:
Without Metal Gear Solid, video games would no longer exist to me.
Hyperbolic, sure, but from where I'm sitting --especially this far after the fact-- it's no less true. I have a friend that likes to tell me that he simply gave up on playing video games after he played Super Mario Bros. 3 as a little kid. In his mind, nothing would be as great ever again, so there was no point in continuing on. Yes, I certainly find this to be defeatist reasoning, but I can't really call him out on his choice; Mario 3 is pretty much a masterpiece by all accounts, and if you're going to hang it up somewhere, that's as good a place as any.
After many, many mowed lawns and shoveled snow, I had owned a PlayStation since its launch. The first year or so was kind of rough, really. Only the first Wipeout was a standout game to me (and I'm not into racing games), while Toshinden and Jumping Flash, however swell they may have looked, just weren't really good games. After the languish of the launch window had ended, though, legitimate, great games were starting to trickle out before the deluge of spectacular software arrived that the PSOne is now known for. Resident Evil. Tekken 2. Final Fantasy VII. All good, and even one or two deservedly revered games (though I've warmed to FF7 over the years). This was a pretty exciting time, really. Studios and publishers could still make high quality games relatively cheaply, and the advent of accessible 3D technology for consumers meant that it was the dawn of the gaming medium's angsty adolescence --one we're just on the verge of moving past now, sort of. By the end of '97, though, none of that heady shit mattered.
Castlevania Symphony of the Night, set up next to its contemporaries, looked old as frozen dog turds thawed from a late spring. It had the nerve to a pixel sprite game in an age where it had no business sitting on the same shelves as most other releases during such a monumental year. But that's just what the publishers and certain corners of the gaming press wanted you to believe at the time. History has proven my, and I suppose the entire world's opinion valid in saying that it is a strikingly beautiful game, then and now, with a soundtrack that just about any video game since Spacewar! would kill their mothers to have. I don't need to get into what makes SotN such a transcendent masterwork (though I probably have before) since it's been universally praised these last 18 or so years. But it's not a joke when I say that if a gun was held to my head, Symphony of the Night is probably my favorite video game of all time. Full stop.
It was also a game that was released during the middle of my final year of high school, though. So, for as optimistic as I was for the future of gaming at a time when astounding evolution was happening at such a rapid pace, life for me was changing right along with it, just in its own, almost mundane way. I played through it at least five times before my prom, and once or twice more over that terrifying limbo summer leading up to moving into a dorm, so I was firmly entrenched in SotN and made no bones about telling whomever that would listen how much of a goddamn buffoon they were for not playing this game. But, you know, life isn't all about that when your comfort level is blown all to hell during your first few months of college.
Honestly, games were starting to kind of leave me cold when I was a confused college freshmen in 1998. I had plenty of other things to deal with, like school work, meeting new people, trying to meet girls, hoping I didn't gain the Freshmen 15, freaking out that I didn't belong where I was, and wishing that life was back to the way it had been 12 months earlier. I had brought my PSOne and my Genesis with me to school and still lived on a steady diet of Tekken 3 with the poor saps on my floor that dared throw down with me, but new games weren't that exciting anymore. I had given up reading magazines, and only checked the Imagine Games Network site once in a while when I was bored. By then, I was getting comfortable with the idea of letting go, and finding other hobbies to fill my time, like, you know, college.
My roommate, though, contended with his own home sickness in the polar opposite way. A nice guy, and not a really hardcore gamer, he came from a somewhat affluent background that meant that if he needed or wanted something, it was only a phone call and a UPS box away. This included games. Normally, I wasn't interested; they were mostly N64 games that nobody gave two shits about (ok, until Mario Party came out and the entire end of our campus flooded into our room for nightly screaming matches that, to this day, makes a vein pop from my forehead. I hate Mario Party). But when Metal Gear Solid found its way to our disproportionately small PO box that October, our poor post-high school brains were blown all over the dorm room walls. Nobody had seen a game like this before, with its cinematic production value and sweeping, well-voice narrative. Word got out around the rest of the floor, and long, nightly parties playing MGS began in earnest; jumping from room to room, an ever growing crowd of guys following a couple of CDs and a memory card from one PlayStation to the next. It was all anyone wanted to talk about. But not for me.
No, for me, Metal Gear Solid was downright seismic. I resigned to play the game on my own, with nobody else present, and between the larger sessions that were happening all around me. I was so entranced with the game and transfixed with playing it on my own terms that I would avoid conversations about it, and even proto-internet spoilers that happened in the campus rec center or in the cafeterias were met with loud grunts of displeasure and looks of savage disgust. MGS was something that we could talk about, but we will talk about it after I finished it on my terms, and in my own way. This made me something of the dorm floor asshole for a minute, but the fury of mostly drunk 18 year-olds was a repute I was willing to accept. Metal Gear was changing me. It made video games mine again.
I don't often think about this, actually, which is really sort of strange for how important it turned out to become in the long term. I mean, college has plenty of pivitol memories attached to it no matter who you are, so when I think about that 4ish year stretch of my life, for whatever reason, MGS gets a little lost in the shuffle. Whenever I read a retrospective, though, my heart flutters a little bit, and I drift back to punching Liquid in the mouth and going toe to toe with Ocelot. Getting the unlimited ammo bandanna for my next playthrough where I would intentionally save Otacon instead of Meryl. Killing Raven with claymore mines and not conventional weapons around the corner. I don't really love military-based games, and again, haven't been too psyched about the rest of the series for a long, long time, but Metal Gear Solid spoke to me in a way that was profound enough to drag me back into video games by the scruff of my neck.
Last week, my wife and I had our first baby. During the five days we spent in the hospital, I finally got a chance to steal about an hour or so of silence (at roughly 4:00am on Thursday) to listen to my early backer episode of this week's Retronauts retrospective on the series leading up to tonight's release of Phantom Pain. And I sat there, stupid grin from ear to ear, taking stock of not only the moment in time I found myself in, but how far I had come since 1998. It wasn't nostalgia, it was legitimate, bittersweet growth. All in the span of a podcast. It's been a long, strange, sometimes brutal and absolutely irreplaceable 17 years.
I have a different problem now compared to then, I suppose. Where I was getting to the point that I was fine with giving up on playing video games altogether --Symphony of the Night winding up being my Super Mario Bros. 3-- I'm in a place now that I want to play games more than ever, and one of them in particular. But who knows if I can anymore? I'm guessing probably a lot less, but I suppose you never can tell. I have something else going on for the next 17 years.
I'll let you know what happens.
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