Metal Gear (メタルギア)

Hideo Kojima wanted to make a war game in 1987; the MSX2 could only display a handful of sprites at once. He turned the constraint into a rule: instead of shooting, you avoid. Metal Gear thus founded the stealth game, before the word existed.

The series became one author's laboratory: hour-long cutscenes, fourth-wall breaks — a boss who reads the player's memory card, another you only beat by switching controller port — and an anti-nuclear argument sustained over thirty years. The public divorce between Kojima and Konami in 2015, after Metal Gear Solid V, remains one of the most discussed episodes in the Japanese industry.