Why is the original Metal Gear a stealth game?

The man who made it told the story himself, on stage. In his Game Developers Conference keynote of 2009, Hideo Kojima said he was stationed in the division that worked on the MSX2 home computer, and that he was given a mission from his very first days at Konami to create a combat game for the MSX2. Rambo was a big hit, he noted, and his bosses wanted that kind of combat game on a popular platform.

The hardware said no. The MSX2 could place 32 sprites on a screen at once, and on a single horizontal line the ninth sprite simply would not display. Kojima demonstrated the point with a Konami shooter, its ships vanishing mid-flight, and told the room: this was not a bug, it was the hardware restriction. Layering sprites for color cut the count further. A player, two enemies, and two bullets nearly filled the screen. A firefight in the Rambo style was not a design problem. It was an impossible mission.

So he climbed around it, step by step, in his own telling. A combat game without fighting would not sell. A combat game about escaping, just running, was, in his word, uncool. A combat game about hiding could be revolutionary, and dressing it as infiltration made it heroic: slip into a military base, stay out of the enemy line of sight, and learn the rule that getting spotted brings everyone running. "Finally, I thought, an industry first: the stealth game genre was born."

What shipped on July 13, 1987, in Japan, with a European release the same year, was exactly that design: Solid Snake starts unarmed inside the fortified state of Outer Heaven, reads patrols by their straight lines of sight, and treats discovery as the disaster the whole game is built around. The MSX2 was never released in North America, so the original had no American release at all. It is now recognized, retrospectively, as the first mainstream stealth game.