This video may look like it’s about Metal Gear Solid 2.
But it’s not.
It’s about ‘THAT game’ from your own childhood that you remember looking forward
to playing more than anything else in the world.
That game that may not yet have been released, or maybe it was out on a console you didn’t
have, or that was financially out of reach for you for a cruel amount of time.
You might only have been weeks.
But it felt like years.
For me, that game was Metal Gear Solid 2.
And I DID have to wait for years.
Old people used to talk about how the good old days and how much they missed them.
Which I didn’t understand, because what they described sounded so much worse than
what we have now!
Plus, at that point, I was young and living through MY good old days, so I lacked the
perspective to understand.
But now I’m older, I do.
The good old days WERE objectively worse.
But it’s BECAUSE they were worse, that everything we did have back then, felt so much better!
I count myself LUCKY that I lived through an era of gaming where you had to go out and
to physically buy a game.
That torturous shopping trip where you read the manual, cover to cover, as you impatiently
waited to get back home again.
Where the games you did have, you played to death, and because you didn’t have anything
better to do, and you had to spend months longing for next game you could play.
Your imagination filled in those gaps (Of which there were many!) and I think I had
more enjoyment THINKING about games I had never played, than I actually had from playing
them!
If you think about it, your fond memories probably aren’t even from the game that
you think they were from.
It was probably from what your imagination thought that game was going to be like.
And let’s be real here- that version of it in your mind was far better than the actual
game could ever be.
So… in a cruel way, that game you were looking forward to playing has never been made.
Picture the scene: it’s the year 2000, and I was 11 years old.
I owned a Playstation 1 and Metal Gear Solid.
But the Playstation 2 was on the way, and the flagship game was to be Metal Gear Solid
2.
There was no way I was going to be able to play it!
It had taken me years of begging to get a Playstation 1.
So there was absolutely no chance I would get a Playstation 2!
But what I COULD get, was the Playstation 2 magazine, and bundled with it was a VHS
tape, featuring 10 minutes of exclusive Metal Gear Solid 2 footage.
I don’t even know how many times I played that tape.
That game was not a game to me- it was another realm that seemed too good to be true!
Too advanced, and too sophisticated, to ever come out on a disk or to grace my TV screen.
Compared with the Playstation 1’s primitive, blocky visuals, Metal Gear Solid 2’s seemed
so advanced that they may as well have been reality.
Breakable glass, shootable tarpaulins, EXPLODING FRUIT…
I wanted that stuff.
And then I would definitely be happy forever more.
The only problem was, I couldn’t have it.
So I just watched that VHS tape, over and over again.
Memorising the footage.
Planning how I’d play each section of it, and all the cool stuff I’d do.
I had that whole thing figured out in my head.
About how I’d be the best version of Solid Snake that I could be.
The only thing I lacked was the game itself!
And of course, the Playstation 2.
That want for something you can’t have wreaks havoc on an 11 year old’s mind, and my need
for this game manifested itself in some weird ways.
There was a maze painted on the floor in the school yard.
My friends and I would spend hours pretending it was a Metal Gear Solid level, hiding behind
its 2D walls, taking out guards from behind, evading security cameras.
And of course, shooting the corners off an imaginary tarpaulin.
I spent all that time in that school yard, trying to grasp what made that Metal Gear
Solid 2 VHS video so great.
Yet doing this never really fulfilled me; and Metal Gear Solid 2’s appeal always hung
just out of reach.
I tried making a game like it on the Atari, with shootable bottles and destructible glass
windows.
Later I got a PC, and started doing it there as well!
Yet even doing all this, never quite scratched that Metal Gear Solid 2 itch.
I vividly remember eating a ripple bar on holiday, babbling endlessly to my parents
about why this game was going to be the greatest thing ever.
I have all these memories associated with a game that I hadn’t even played!
I was obsessed!
I was simultaneously living the dream, while also being tortured by something I couldn’t
have.
I’m sure this particular example I had with Metal Gear Solid 2 won’t apply to you.
Maybe you have your own equivalent of this that tortured you for what felt like years.
If so then share in the comments section.
Any way.
The day came, the Playstation 2 was released, and I remember walking into a shop and seeing
it there, on the shelf: Metal Gear Solid 2, as a physical, purchasable object!
It didn’t seem real.
I couldn’t understand why nobody else had noticed this landmark occasion.
Why everybody else was just walking past it when it was right there on the shelf in front
of me!
I then remember reading the reviews for it, and while it was great, it wasn’t perfect.
And I knew they were wrong, because it HAD to be perfect!
Because it felt that way, in my mind.
How could anybody NOT think this game that I hadn’t played was perfect?!
Bear in mind I was 11 years old.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was about as good as gaming was ever going to
get for me.
And that’s what an obsessed child mind did to me: it made Metal Gear Solid 2 BIGGER than
reality.
The years went by, and I played games that far exceeded Metal Gear Solid 2.
But those were only games.
Metal Gear Solid 2 wasn’t- because I still hadn’t played it, in my mind it became this
incredible ‘future’ of gaming that still towered over everything else, years after!
So much so, that even to this day, in my mind, Metal Gear Solid 2 feels like an incredible
future title that nothing else has come close to!
Not even Metal Gear Solid 5, which is currently sat in my Steam Library.
Even all these years on, a bit of my mind STILL THINKS it’s the best thing ever.
I know what you’re thinking!
Why didn’t I make it my life’s goal to PLAY this game?
I don’t know.
I suppose other things came up.
Stuff like Rome Total War, and Half Life 2.
But here’s the funny thing: I did EVENTUALLY play, and complete, Metal Gear Solid 2!
I mean, I had to borrow it from the library, and I played it on some terrible keyboard
controls.
But I did it!
And…
it was alright.
But I had left my playthrough of the game too late!
There was no way to erase the perfect game that already existed up there, in my mind,
and so now these two different versions of Metal Gear Solid 2 sit alongside each other,
in my head.
One, perfect and based on that VHS recording.
The other is the game itself, all naked, pretentious and weird and… orange.
These days, I think it’s the third Metal Gear Solid that’s considered by most to
be the better of the two.
But I don’t give a damn about that one!
I see the footage of that and it’s nothing special.
But Metal Gear Solid 2?
Oh, footage of that still looks amazing.
Do you wish that you could go back to a time when Metal Gear Solid 2 is the best thing
ever, and you’re not even able to play it?
No.
Of course you don’t.
It was rubbish.
Making this video has made me realise that I’m not even sure I even enjoyed it.
I was obsessed, yes.
Tortured, even!
My younger self would want nothing more than to be in my shoes, right now.
And yet I want nothing more than to have the mind I did back then.
Back when my imagination could produce more vivid memories than any game I could boot
up on my mega-PC system today.
These days, I have all the money, and all the gear that’s needed to play any game
that I like.
Yet I lack the most important part: and that’s the craving to actually play them.
Life is cruel.
There’s always something missing.
The grass always seems greener on the other side.
And I just have to try and appreciate what I have now, just like my 11 year-old self
got to appreciate what he didn’t.
So yes, I suppose I have played Metal Gear Solid 2.
But I haven’t played the game I saw Metal Gear Solid 2 as being in my mind.
And I never will.
And that’s a damn shame.