Metal Gear is a stealth game designed by Hideo Kojima. Metal Gear was developed and first published by Konami in 1987 for the MSX2 home computer. The game is considered to be the progenitor of the stealth game genre, in which avoiding direct encounter with the enemy is emphasized over attacking openly.
The premise revolves around a special forces operative codenamed Solid Snake who goes into a solo infiltration mission into the fortified state of Outer Heaven to destroy Metal Gear, a bipedal walking tank capable of launching nuclear missiles from anywhere in the world.
The MSX2 version was initially released only in Japan and the Netherlands. A heavily altered port for the Japanese Family Computer and its western counterpart, the Nintendo Entertainment System, was released months afterwards. The original MSX2 version would be ported to mobile phones in Japan in 2004, followed by its inclusion in Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence for the PlayStation 2 in 2006, which led to a more mainstream English localization of the original MSX2 version in North America and Europe.
Its success led to the creation of two separately-produced sequels; the first one, Snake's Revenge, was produced specifically for the Western market for the NES and the other, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, was the canonical sequel developed by Kojima and released in Japan for the MSX2 in response to the former's creation. The latter was followed by a successful series of sequels and spinoffs.
