The reveal of Metallic Gear Strong at E3 1997 had a big effect, notably on one Sony developer who was busy making his personal espionage-themed motion recreation at the very same time.
Talking to Retro Gamer, Richard Ham, design lead on Syphon Filter at developer Eidetic (now often known as Days Gone developer Sony Bend) defined how Metallic Gear Strong’s trailer introduced the conference to a standstill. That is partly as a result of Konami performed it each single hour, on an enormous display that dominated the conference corridor.
“The primary time the world noticed this trailer, it was not simply on some little TVs on the Konami sales space. This was on a huge jumbotron display that towered over the whole lot. As I recall, each hour they’d play that trailer, and for all the conference this may turn into like appointment viewing – there’d be an enormous crowd and so everybody would come and sit and watch.”
In line with Ham, all that focus was well-deserved. “It was so next-level,” he says, “so many fascinating digital camera angles for the whole lot. It felt so cinematic.” For Ham and the workforce at Eidetic, that wasn’t nice information, since “cinematic gameplay was one thing I used to be attempting very, very exhausting to attain with Syphon Filter, with digital camera locks and being a fan of John Woo and motion cinema.”
That cinematic model wasn’t the one similarity between Syphon Filter and Metallic Gear Strong. Each video games are semi-political thrillers with a mix of stealth and motion gameplay. Given their early console launch, there’s additionally a definite visible similarity to recover from, particularly when you think about protagonist Gabriel Logan’s fetching, Snake-esque gray jumpsuit.
All these similarities have been notably haunting for Ham, who mentioned that although Syphon Filter finally supplied a “radically totally different form of expertise,” he “was despairing” within the wake of that E3 trailer, as a result of “it seemed like [Konami] have been doing the whole lot that we have been attempting to do, higher.”
Finally, it did not actually matter. Syphon Filter was critically and commercially profitable, happening to spawn 5 sequels within the eight years following its launch. It did not turn into the form of world phenomenon that Metallic Gear Strong proved to be, admittedly, however only a few video games do, so maybe an existence lived within the shadow of greatness is completely respectable.
Metallic Gear Strong 3 remake will credit score Hideo Kojima and the unique builders since “they’re part of these video games too.”