NES / MSX2 · 1987 · Japan / US · Art: Akira Nishimura
The box art for the first Metal Gear did not depict its hero Solid Snake at all — the figure is copied from a publicity still of actor Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese in The Terminator, one of the most famous cases of 1980s game art "borrowing" from film.
The packaging illustration for the original Metal Gear — released on Japan's MSX2 in 1987 and adapted for the NES port — is one of the medium's most notorious examples of box art that has almost nothing to do with the game inside it. The commanding, rifle-holding soldier meant to be Solid Snake is not an original character design at all. His pose and appearance are lifted directly from a publicity photograph of actor Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese, the human hero of James Cameron's 1984 film The Terminator. The illustration was drawn by Akira Nishimura, a freelance artist who produced key art for other Konami titles including Gradius, Castlevania, and the Japanese version of Contra. Hideo Kojima, who directed the game, was newly employed at Konami at the time and had no involvement in the box illustration — a reminder that in the 1980s a game's cover art was frequently commissioned separately from its development, by artists who might never have seen the game, and who freely reached for the most heroic reference images they could find. Reaching for Hollywood was standard practice. In an era of primitive in-game graphics — Metal Gear's Snake was a small sprite of a few colours — the box art carried the entire burden of making a game look exciting on a shelf, and there was little to stop an artist from tracing a movie star to get there. The Terminator was a natural well to draw from, not least because the film's tone of lone operatives and future war chimed with Metal Gear's military espionage premise; Kojima has cited action cinema among the game's influences. The irony is that this borrowed image helped establish a franchise that would become synonymous with cinematic ambition. The Kyle Reese pose fed into the visual identity of Solid Snake that carried forward through the series, so that a character famous for anchoring one of gaming's most film-literate franchises began life on the box as a photocopy of an actual film. It remains the definitive anecdote about 1980s box art's casual relationship with its source material — the cover that sold a stealth classic by showing you someone else's movie.