(Sorry, no screenshots today…  I just didn’t have the time.)

There was a time, not all that long ago, when a game like Metal Gear would have been a very hard sell in the American market. At the time of its 1988 release, a game with such a strong militaristic setting would have been the exclusive province of action-oriented arcade contests, along the lines of Commando, Contra, or even Rush’n Attack. A game where you spent the lion’s share of your time sneaking around enemy fortresses hoping to avoid detection just wouldn’t have been seen as a positive thing – after all, how many cardboard boxes did John Rambo ever hide in during his jungle rampage?

And yet, for whatever reason, the original Metal Gear struck just the right chord with American gamers upon its NES debut. Maybe it was the combination of a modern military motif with the kind of item-based puzzles and exploration that were uncommon outside the sword-and-sorcery milieu of, for instance, The Legend of Zelda. Maybe it was the intriguing storyline in which you eventually discover you’ve been taking orders from the enemy leader all along. And yes, maybe Konami and other game makers greatly underestimated just how “ready” American players were for a game with infiltration themes. Although the NES Metal Gear is looked down upon with scorn by those who’ve played the more complex and detailed MSX2 original – and by series creator Hideo Kojima, who once referred to the Famicom port as “absolute garbage” – it is today considered an essential part of 8-bit history on our side of the Pacific.

Naturally, such a popular game demands a sequel, and the usual order of business would be for Konami to simply import and translate the follow-up game from Japan. However, in this case that presented a problem, as at that time there was no sequel to Metal Gear, Japanese or otherwise – nor was there one in the pipeline. Thus, Konami was left to follow Plan B: To program a new game from scratch, exclusively for the Western markets, one that took the features American gamers seemed to like about Metal Gear and combined them with new elements, new challenges, and a new, more cinematic storyline.

The game that resulted would end up being quite possibly the single most controversial in the entire Metal Gear series.

Snake’s Revenge (NES, 1990): Interestingly, Konami elected not to call this game “Metal Gear II” or some variant that would indicate the game was in fact a sequel. It’s simply called Snake’s Revenge, as such and without subtitles or embellishments. As you’ll soon see, that decision would prove absolutely prophetic in light of later developments.

Snake’s Revenge takes place some three years after the events of Metal Gear. FOXHOUND has discovered that a new terrorist nation has somehow gotten hold of the plans for the Metal Gear mecha and either has intentions of building their own improved model – or has already done so. Lt. Solid Snake, the man who brought down Outer Heaven and exposed Big Boss as the traitor he was, is assigned to infiltrate their military base and discover just how much truth there is to these reports. This time, however, you’re not going it alone; FOXHOUND has provided you with two partners in Operation 747 – Naval intelligence man John Turner and demolitions expert Nick Myer. Of course, your “partners” soon end up killed, captured, or otherwise out of the game, and it’s all on you to find and destroy the new Metal Gear.

Snake’s Revenge takes the gameplay concepts found in Metal Gear and expands on them. As usual, you’ll spend most of your time sneaking around, trying to avoid detection and fighting only when you can’t avoid it. In this process, you’ll also be searching for upgraded weapons, security keycards, captured POWs (some of which have vital info to pass along), and more gadgetry than the whole Q Division could come up with in a month. You’ll also have to keep in touch with your partners via the series’ everpresent Transceiver, although in this case there’re no frequencies to remember; you just select a name from a list and are automatically connected to that person, provided he or she is in a position to take your call. Unfortunately, this little alteration, despite being quite the time-saver, takes away a vital level of verisimilitude from the Metal Gear setting… you certainly won’t feel like you’re trying to tune in your buddies from behind enemy lines, or seeing if you can listen in on enemy radio chatter!

The game itself is a bit of a stylistic departure for the series. Right away, you’ll notice the graphics seem simpler and more “cartoony” when compared to the grittiness of the original Metal Gear game. I am, however, willing to overlook the decidedly gaudy colors of the Solid Snake sprite, even though it makes no sense for Snake to wear a bright orange jumpsuit on a stealth mission – in a jungle setting no less. One of the complaints I remember about the first Metal Gear was how Snake blended almost too well into the background of most screens, making it unnecessarily hard for the inexperienced player to find him, so at least Snake’s new ensemble makes him easy to spot for the player… and if it seems contradictory to Snake’s espionage mission, I suppose you’ll just have to chalk it up to artistic or at least technological license – you can only do so much with NES sprites, after all – and try not to think about it too much. (Besides, Snake is just that damn good at hiding!)

Or maybe Snake wanted to up the challenge for himself, because when compared to the first game Snake’s Revenge is almost too easy! I’ve been able to stand literally right next to enemy guards and not have them notice me unless I was directly in their line of sight; even just a few pixels off, and they acted like I wasn’t even there. There are also plenty of cubbyholes and nooks in which you can stash yourself if need be. On the other hand, this game reincorporates a feature of the MSX2 original that the Famicom/NES port dropped, but is now an intregal part of the Metal Gear experience for many – the “!!” attack mode. In the normal, “!” attack mode, only guards and soldiers on the current screen will give chase, and you can lose them by just changing screens. That mode exists in Snake’s Revenge as well. However, if the guard that spots you has two !s over his head, that defensive tactic won’t work; you’ll be chased wherever you go until you kill all your pursuers. Only experience (gained through many retries) will tell you which areas will produce the “!” or “!!” alarms.

But the biggest objection made by Metal Gear fans towards this game is the bizarre, out of place, and wholly unnecessary side-scrolling sequences that were added. Apparently, since side-scrollers were all the rage elsewhere in Nintendoland, some genius at Konami decided that Snake’s Revenge had to have that gameplay as well, so there are selected places during the game where you’ll be forced to dust off your platformer skills. Only problem is, even in these sequences you’ll still have to observe stealth tactics – and it’s much harder to do so here than in the standard overhead areas, since you can only move left or right (and duck). This quickly becomes the very personification of frustration as too often you’ll find yourself trapped with nowhere to run and no end in sight to the waves of soldiers who came running in response to the “!!” alarm. Thankfully, these sequences are comparitively short in length and few in number… but this doesn’t change the fact that they should have never been here in the first place. This sort of gameplay just doesn’t work as a side-scroller, and you’d think that at some point during R&D somebody at Konami had to have asked someone “Uh, why are we doing this again?” It doesn’t surprise me at all that these torturous sequences are probably the biggest reason many gamers give up on Snake’s Revenge.

Which is actually a bit of a shame, since if you take the side-scrolling scenes out of the equation (and here I do stress that they are the exception rather than the rule), you have here a game that actually does a credible job in capturing some of that elusive zeitgeist and flavor that made Metal Gear a hit. Although you’ll have to resort to shootouts and fisticuffs a lot more often than before, the order of the day is still infiltration, and the less of you your enemies see, the better off you’ll be and the easier time you’ll have of it.

However, none of that is quite enough to salvage Snake’s Revenge’s reputation in the grand scheme of things. Konami’s official position is now that this game never happened; it has been relegated to “alternate universe” status, like an Elseworlds book or an “imaginary story” for fans of comicdom’s Silver Age. The official Metal Gear timeline omits Snake’s Revenge entirely, instead placing Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake as the “true” sequel to the original game… this in spite of the fact that game was released only in Japan for the MSX2 computer and never saw the light of day elsewhere in any official capacity (until being included as an extra in 2006’s Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence). And therein lies another interesting tale. During development of Snake’s Revenge, or so the story goes, Hideo Kojima learned of the project (which was done without his input or his knowledge) and it took that to convince him that the Metal Gear fanbase was indeed strong enough to support a sequel – but he wanted to take things in a different direction than what Konami was doing with their game. That was the moment the idea for Metal Gear 2 was born, and of course the rest is history.

So in a way, despite its reputation and its retconning out of series canon, Snake’s Revenge is actually one of the most important games in the Metal Gear family… because if it hadn’t been made, we might never have seen the rest of the series. If you can tolerate its patently brutal side-scrolling stages, it’s even a pretty decent game on its own merit… nothing revolutionary or even particularly memorable, but certainly not the hopeless mess you might expect given what’s been written about it. It’s worth a look if you can find it, I think.

If you liked that, try...

1. Retro-Active: NES “First Sequel” Syndrome
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3. Retro-Active: Bionic Commando (NES)
4. Retro-Active: Caltron 6-in-1
5. Retro-Active: Top 10 Retro Puzzle Games NOT Called “Tetris”

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