What is the original Metal Gear (1987) for MSX2?

Metal Gear was released by Konami for the MSX2 computer in Japan in July 1987, designed by a young Hideo Kojima. The founding constraint is covered on the stealth origins page in this shelf: the hardware could not handle many moving sprites or bullets, so Kojima inverted the brief and made a game about avoiding combat instead of winning it, hiding in cardboard boxes, crawling through ducts and watching patrol routes.

The story became the series' foundation myth. Rookie FOXHOUND operative Solid Snake infiltrates Outer Heaven, a fortified state in South Africa, to rescue the captured agent Gray Fox and destroy Metal Gear TX-55, a bipedal tank that can launch nuclear strikes from anywhere. The mission's commander, Big Boss, is revealed as the enemy, a twist the series spent three decades unpacking.

Two 1987 versions exist and they are not equal. The MSX2 original is Kojima's game; the NES version, ported by a separate Konami team without his involvement, changes level layouts, drops and rearranges content, and became the version most Western players knew for years, helped by its striking Western cover art, which famously borrowed its Snake likeness from a Hollywood film still. The MSX2 game only reached the West officially much later, through collections and the Metal Gear Solid 3 re-releases that bundled it.

Physically, the MSX2 original is a cartridge in a Konami cardboard box with a manual, a format that predates the series' fame and was sold mainly in Japan and parts of Europe where the MSX standard lived. Complete copies are genuinely scarce compared with the mass produced NES cartridge, and that scarcity is structural, not hype.

The game's printed support was light by modern standards, mostly magazine coverage and hint books in Japan, because the guide industry around a single game had not yet formed. Modern collections document it far better than 1987 print did, which is a pattern this shelf notes across the early series.