Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The game starts with a short, punchy voiceover from playable Hero Sol-
id Snake over a black background:
SNAKE
The Hudson River, two years ago. We had classified intelligence
that a new type of Metal Gear was scheduled for transport. The
whole thing stank, but our noses had been out in the cold too
long.
This is followed by a promising, dialogue-free introductory cutscene in
which a mysterious figure in a trenchcoat runs through the rain on the Ge-
orge Washington Bridge at night. As a nondescript oil tanker passes under
the bridge, the mysterious running man turns almost invisible, then jumps
of the bridge and, suspended by a bungie of some kind, lands on the
tanker's deck! His stealth cloak sparking, he throws it aside it to reveal he's
Solid Snake. The game's title comes up dramatically.
So far, so good. The opening cutscene is a bit long at just over four
minutes, but it's entertaining, and beautifully rendered and animated. And
with almost no dialogue! Our show-to-tell ratio is great up to this point.
But then we enter into a two-headshot radio conversation UI between
Snake and his techie partner, Otacon. At this point, things rapidly deterior-
ate, as the two characters engage in a seemingly endless and often baff-
ling conversation ranging from mundane references to the previous game
to absolutely critical gameplay information.
During my GDC tutorial, I generally subject the group to the entirety of
this noninteractive opening sequence. I've received feedback from a few
attendees that while they understood why I did it, they thought it was a
waste of their time to sit through the entire thing. Which, of course, is the
point.
It is a full
eleven minutes and thirty-five seconds
before the player is fi-
nally handed over control of Solid Snake and allowed to play. But prior to
this the player has been barraged with a baffling expository hailstorm; a
confounding concoction of very important core story and gameplay in-
formation, seemingly randomly mixed with obscure references and ex-
traneous story points that could have been more gradually fed to the play-
er during gameplay (or not at all).
Mixing essential information with reams of less-pertinent exposition
compounds the problem, as the player can't confidently skip the non-in-
