Metal Gear Solid · PlayStation · Konami · 1998
Halfway through the game, a character tells you to find Meryl's codec frequency "on the back of the CD case". Players searched the game. It was on the actual box, sitting next to them.
Metal Gear Solid is very probably the first game to make its own retail packaging part of the puzzle. Partway through the story, the player is instructed to contact Meryl on the codec, and told that her frequency can be found on the back of the CD case. Players duly hunted through the game world for an in-fiction CD case, found nothing, and eventually — often after considerable frustration — realised that the game meant the actual, physical PlayStation case lying on the carpet next to them. Printed on the rear insert, in a screenshot, is the number: 140.15. It is Kojima's single cleanest fourth-wall break, and it works because it is not a joke about the player being a player. It is simply a piece of information that exists in the real world rather than the fictional one, and the game declines to acknowledge any distinction between the two. Colonel Campbell tells you where the number is; he is right; you were just looking in the wrong universe. Konami of America, however, recognised a commercial problem the trick created: an enormous proportion of PlayStation games were rented, and rental copies frequently arrived without their original packaging. Their solution was to reprint the image on a specific page of the instruction manual — so that even a player with no box could find the frequency, provided they still had the book.
A puzzle whose solution is printed on the object you bought the game in
Most fourth-wall breaks are rhetorical: a character addresses the player, or comments on being in a game. Metal Gear Solid's codec trick is different in kind, because it does not comment on anything. It simply requires the player to perform an action in the physical world in order to progress in the fictional one, and it treats that as unremarkable.
That is why it lands so much harder than a wink at the camera. The moment of realisation — the player looking up from the screen, picking up the case, turning it over, and finding that the number is genuinely there — is a small collapse of the boundary between the two spaces. The game reached out of the television and into the room, and it did so without ever breaking character. Psycho Mantis reading the memory card is the more famous trick; the codec on the box is the more elegant one.
The codec puzzle is a casualty of the medium's own progress. It depends absolutely on the game being a physical object that arrives in a printed package, and it therefore cannot survive digital distribution — there is no back of the box on the PlayStation Store. Re-releases have had to work around it by other means, and every workaround is a diminishment: an in-game document, a hint, a number simply supplied.
Konami's original rental fix is the first sign of this fragility. Even in 1998, the trick was only one missing cardboard insert away from becoming an impassable wall, and Konami of America saw it coming and printed the image in the manual as insurance. The puzzle survived the rental market and did not survive the disappearance of the box — which makes it a small monument to a period when the thing you bought and the thing you played were the same object.