The reveal of Metal Gear Solid at E3 1997 had a big impact, especially on a Sony developer who was busy creating his own spy-themed action game at the exact same time.
Speaking to Retro Gamer, Richard Ham, Syphon Filter design lead at developer Eidetic (now known as Days Gone developer Sony Bend), explained how the Metal Gear Solid trailer brought the convention to a standstill. That’s partly because Konami ran it every hour, on a giant screen that dominated the convention floor.
“The first time the world saw this trailer, it wasn’t just on a few small TVs in the Konami booth. It was on a giant screen that dominated everything. If I remember correctly, they were showing this trailer every hour, and for the entire show, it was like an appointment viewing: there was a huge crowd and everyone would come and sit and watch.”
Ham says all the attention was well-deserved. “It was really next level,” he says, “so many interesting camera angles for everything. It was so cinematic.” For Ham and the Eidetic team, that wasn’t good news, because “cinematic gameplay was something I was trying very, very hard to achieve with Syphon Filter, with camera locks and being a fan of John Woo and action cinema.”
That cinematic style wasn’t the only similarity between Syphon Filter and Metal Gear Solid. Both games are semi-political thrillers with a mix of stealth and action gameplay. Given their early console launches, there’s also a distinct visual similarity to overcome, especially once you factor in protagonist Gabriel Logan’s alluring gray jumpsuit, which is reminiscent of Snake.
All of these similarities were particularly unsettling to Ham, who said that while Syphon Filter ultimately offered a “radically different kind of experience,” he “was in despair” following that E3 trailer because “it felt like [Konami] “We do everything we try to do, better.”
In the end, it didn’t really matter. Syphon Filter was a critical and commercial success, and spawned five sequels in the eight years since its release. It didn’t become the kind of global phenomenon that Metal Gear Solid was, admittedly, but very few games do, so perhaps an existence lived in the shadow of greatness is perfectly respectable.
The Metal Gear Solid 3 remake will reward Hideo Kojima and the original developers because “they are also part of these games.”