Spoiler Warning: If you still haven’t played through Metal Gear Solid 4, don’t read this article.
“Getting old isn’t all that bad, you know.”
That familiar, beautiful song kicks in and stirs up all kinds of emotions. Nothing’s better at evoking specific moments in your life than music you were listening to at the time, and this song takes me back to 1998: the year when reading EGM made want to write about games for a living, when I had a crush on a girl named Amanda in high school but was still a little too shy to say anything, and when I beat Metal Gear Solid — which immediately became an all-time favorite.
And here I am 11 years later, back on Shadow Moses Island. Act 4 of Metal Gear Solid 4 returns you to the setting of the original MGS, and re-exploring familiar virtual territory over a decade later was one of the most revelatory moments I’ve had playing a video game. I don’t think any other game has made me feel my mortality as potently as this.
It’s only been nine years for Solid Snake within the story of Metal Gear Solid 4 (recall the game came out in 2008 — I’m late to the party), but he’s feeling the nostalgia, too. Old conversations ring in his head and specific places recall specific memories: “…A surveillance camera?” Yes, a surveillance camera, but now old and destitute and collapsing to the ground. A once cutting-edge hazard now a limp, sterile relic. Time moves on, and even virtual spaces decay with age.
Time moved on for me, too. I wouldn’t call 26 going on 27 old, but I am older, and this is about the age where age starts to mean something to you. Can anyone else remember the first time you watched a show on TV Land and suddenly realized you could remember when you used to watch it when it originally aired? If not you’ll be able to some day, and believe me when I tell you it’s one of the most depressing thresholds you’ll cross in life.
Hell, it even turns out I may be getting as senile as Snake: When I got to Otacon’s old lab, I couldn’t remember the pass code to access the security system he gave both of us moments ago (too bad I couldn’t look it up on the back of the box this time). It’s a small touch that proves once again that no one’s better than MGS series creator Hideo Kojima at finding ingenious ways to blend your mental and emotional state with the character you’re controlling.
And at this moment Snake and I are thinking (almost) the same thing: Has it really been 11 (9) years? So much has changed. In a sense, the return to Shadow Moses plays like an anti-remake, which is interesting considering Kojima already remade MGS with The Twin Snakes. Here is one of my favorite games re-created with state-of-the-art technology not to re-live it, but to re-examine it with the perspective that an extra decade of life experience brings.
Why are gamers so fixated on remakes, anyway? Do you have any idea how collectively apeshit the gaming community would go if Square Enix announced a Final Fantasy 7 remake for the PlayStation 3 tomorrow? But why? Why do we so desperately want to relive specific games from our past?
I have some theories: They were the games we loved when we were still young enough to love video games more than anything in the world; the games that broadened our idea of what video games could be and how much they could mean to us; or maybe just the games that happened to coincide with moments of great importance in our lives.
Maybe this moment in MGS4 affected me so much because 1998 was such a meaningful year to me. Maybe I’d rather replay the original MGS instead of Twin Snakes for the same reason I’d rather listen to the original version of a favorite song rather than a remix.
It’s all about striking those elusive chords of nostalgia, the little moments that bring up our glowing X button to relive flashes of key events in our lives…the has-been crushes, the dreams before they collided with realities.
All of which brings me back to what makes the return to Shadow Moses maybe Kojima’s greatest stroke of genius. Here he has created a virtuoso segment that combines fictional and life continuity into a bittersweet confluence that challenges our desire to relive the past, that confronts us with the truism that we plain and simply can’t. No, I can’t re-play MGS. Not the same way I did the first time, because it can never mean that much to me again.
It’s a statement that would be despairing if Kojima didn’t take the next step and see the silver lining — that maybe that’s OK. “Getting old isn’t all that bad, you know,” Otacon tells Snake.
Maybe not. What we lose in innocence we gain (we hope) in wisdom, and the 15-year-old I was in 1998 couldn’t have experienced and fully appreciated a gaming moment quite like this.
Note: The title to this piece is taken from this excellent annual MSN Movies feature of the same name.