Insider - The Year Stealth Games Got Serious (Patreon)

Hello!

Welcome to the first Insider, which is the name for these behind-the-scenes posts I'll be doing for $5 Patrons (and up). 

I want to start talking about episodes before they're made so I can get feedback and ideas to help make them the best they can be. So, here's what I'm thinking for the first episode of 2019.

Over Christmas, I ended up playing a bunch of stealth games. Sly Cooper, Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2, and Thief: The Dark Project. And when I read about them, I was struck by this idea that stealth games didn't really exist properly until suddenly, in 1998, they absolutely did.

Three games came out in the same year: Tenchu, MGS, and Thief. And after that, stealth was everywhere. Splinter Cell, Sly Cooper, Hitman, Deus Ex, and so on. 

And so I wanted to know: why was 1998 the year of the stealth game? And what did these "first" three games bring to the table? 

I want to do more about stealth games in the future, but this seemed like a good place to start!

This is the first draft for the script for this episode. I guess spoiler alert, if you'd prefer to just watch the video without knowing what I'm going to say! 

Stealth is everywhere.

You’ve got huge stealth franchises like Hitman and Dishonored. Indie sneak ‘em ups like The Swindle and The Marvellous Miss Take. And stealth bits in most major games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Red Dead Redemption 2. We can’t seem to hide from games that are about, well, hiding.

But for most of gaming history, stealth wasn’t really a thing.

Okay, sure - there were some early games that incorporated hide-and-seek. The Sega arcade game 005 had guards with flashlights, and you had to wind through a warehouse without entering those big yellow beams. Castle Wolfenstein had you putting on disguises to saunter past SS Stormtroopers. And the first two Metal Gear games already had Solid Snake crawling through vents and hiding in cardboard boxes. 

But still, these games were few and far between - and practically non-existent in the years after Metal Gear 2’s release in 1990.

Until, 1998 - when three huge stealth games suddenly appeared all in the same year. Three games that would firmly establish the core elements that make up a 3D stealth game, introduce players en masse to the idea of sneaking past guards, and influence almost every stealth franchise we know today.

First, was Tenchu: Stealth Assassins - released on PlayStation in February In Japan, and August in the US. 

As the name might suggest, the game is all about staying unseen and then striking from the shadows. And suitably, taking on enemies face-to-face will be a difficult fight that will probably sap your health bar, but striking from the back will kill foes in a single hit - sometimes complete with a cinematic stealth kill animation.

What made this game especially cool was the grappling hook, which could be freely aimed at rooftops and cause you to zip up above enemies. Combine this with a generous double jump and you’ve got a game that was mostly about using the verticality of levels to stay unseen - before dropping down to silently dispatch guards.

Tenchu has probably aged the worst of these games, with its awkward controls and tiny draw distance - but its claim as the first 3D stealth game can’t be taken away.

Much later in the year, the PlayStation saw another critical stealth game. Released in September in Japan and October in the United States, Metal Gear Solid released to instant critical acclaim.

The game stars Solid Snake, a solider who prefers to sneak past enemies than take them on face-to-face. And he’s got all sorts of skills and gadgets for doing just that - like being able to crawl under objects, choke enemies out, or hide in a cardboard box.

You can certainly try to kill enemies in a more conventional way, but this will use up resources like bullets and rations that will be much needed in the game’s boss battles - which momentarily ditch stealth for more hands-on action.

Metal Gear Solid is perhaps best known for its cinematic storytelling, long codec calls, and top notch voice acting, but it is - at its core - a stealth game, that really put the focus on avoiding combat altogether.

Finally, just as the year was about to finish, Looking Glass Studios released Thief: The Dark Project on PC in November of 1998. 

Like these other games, Thief certainly lets you try and kill enemies - but you’ll likely end up dead. You’re better off sticking to the shadows, and using tools like your trusty blackjack to knock enemies out. Oh, and if you’re playing on the harder difficulties you won’t be allowed to kill enemies at all.

Thief’s levels are open and interconnected affairs, giving you multiple pathways to your goal: which is often to pinch some kind of sword, sceptre, or jewel from the innermost sanctum of a well guarded mansion. Just finding the darn thing - which requires the use of a half-finished map with handwritten notes - is a major challenge. 

But getting past guards unseen and crucially - unheard - was an even greater task. You’d need to stay in the shadows if you didn’t want to be spotted, and had to think carefully about the surface you were walking on: soft leaves didn’t make much noise, but running across a hard tiled floor will certainly alert guards.

You really had to consider the space in two forms: light, and sound. But, luckily, you can manipulate this space to your own liking: using water arrows to extinguish candles and create areas of darkness, or use moss arrows to create silent tiles to walk on.

While these three games are worlds apart in terms of theme and location, and come from very different backgrounds, they all came - independently - to the same conclusion on a lot of design choices. 

For example, all three games use their heads-up display to give you more information about whether you’re safe or spotted.

Tenchu has a Ki Meter, which changes colour to represent the awareness of nearby guards and has a number telling you how close the nearest guard is to you. Metal Gear Solid offers up the Soliton radar, which shows the exact vision cone of enemies as they patrol - but it will jam if you get spotted, putting you at risk of running directly into more foes. And Thief has a Light Gem at the bottom of the screen which tells you how visible you are - and guards are extremely vocal about their current state as they will shout out when they’ve seen something suspicious.

Information like this is critically important in stealth games, as it removes the ambiguity of whether or not you’re about to be spotted. And information like this will continue to be a big part of stealth games: Mark of the Ninja shows you how far your sounds are travelling. Assassin’s Creed lets you track enemies through walls. And Spider-Man even tells you if an enemy is safe to eliminate.

Whether this information is actually a bit too much is perhaps a topic for a future video. 

All three games also have multiple levels of guard awareness. There’s not just a binary flip between being hidden and being seen - but guards have a middle state where they’re merely suspicious and will investigate suspect sights and sounds. This gives you a bit of leeway to make and recover from a small mistake, without flipping the entire system into alert mode.

But you can also use this state to your own benefit. All of these games hit on this idea of manipulating guard AI to your own needs. In Metal Gear Solid, you can knock on walls to lure guards one way, while you slip past the other. In Tenchu, you can trick enemies into eating poisoned food. And in Thief, you can use noisemaker arrows to distract foes, or deliberately make noise to lure guards into a trap. 

If you do get spotted, guards will eventually give up their hunt if you manage to slip away and hide. In Metal Gear Solid, there’s even a countdown to show you how long you need to stay hidden for before the guard’s state is reset. This allows you to shift the game back to its original, stealthy state without having to reload your save game or kill everyone in sight. 

So, the question I’m left with, is “why 1998”? How did the stealth genre go from drips-and-drabs in the years before 1998, to a full on Cambrian explosion in the years afterwards?

Well I think it’s down to two things: changing technology, and the nature of influence. 

In terms of technology, this period in the mid- to late-90s gave us the invention of 3D, polygonal games, and CDs instead of cartridges and floppy disks. And this new tech led to all sorts of new genres, like open-world hi-jinx in Grand Theft Auto, rhythm action games in Parappa the Rapper, survival horror in Alone in the Dark, and climbing about in Tomb Raider.

Developers were really experimenting with what games could be in this era - and that included making games that were primarily about hiding from enemies, instead of engaging them.  

Technology was certainly at the heart of Thief, as well. The game relied on CD quality audio to work, the way sound propagates through the environment was revolutionary at the time, and the guard AI was so advanced that it was a broken, buggy mess up until the last few months of development. 

But the design of the game was inspired by lesser known titles, like the submarine simulator Silent Service. On a podcast, Thief’s original designer Ken Levine talked about the power dynamics of submarines, saying…

“When the enemy can’t detect you, you’re incredibly powerful. You have these torpedos and you can strike unseen. But when you get spotted by the destroyers there’s this panic because you’re not going to be able to duke it out with them, toe to toe. And that’s so the opposite of what shooters were”.

But it’s interesting that Ken would need to go to such a place for inspiration - because many of the key stealth tenants I’ve talked about here actually already existed in another game. 

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake was as much a stealth game as anything released in 1998 - it had a radar to show enemy locations. It had guards who would become suspicious and investigate sounds, and you could lure enemies around by knocking on walls. You could reset the game state to be neutral if you managed to hide. And it even had loud metal grates that would alert guards if you ran over them. It really is the first proper stealth game.

But it’s not that surprising that it wasn’t all that influential. The developers at Looking Glass likely never played it, seeing as the game was exclusive to a relatively obscure computer called the MSX2 and was only released in Japan.

(The worldwide NES sequel to Metal Gear, Snake’s Revenge, is a completely different game, and is quite terrible).

Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima was basically done with the series after Solid Snake, preferring to focus on graphic adventure stuff like Policenauts. But, again, technology changed things. 3D graphics gave Kojima a reason to revisit his sneaky roots, saying, “For me, Metal Gear as a series was complete, but at that point I thought I would be able do what I originally intended to do with these polygons in real time. For example, if you are hiding under a table you can change the point of view, or hiding in a locker you can let the player see how it looks from inside the locker". 

And with this game now being a huge, mainstream, worldwide success - developers suddenly took note. 

Splinter Cell, for example, was made with the explicit purpose of being a rival to the in-development Metal Gear Solid 2. And Thief is name-checked as the inspiration behind a bunch of stealth greats, too. Splinter Cell also took ideas from here, like the light meter on Sam Fisher’s back. Mark of the Ninja was designer Nels Anderson’s attempts to turn Thief into a side scroller. And Dishonored is practically a spiritual successor, even down to getting the voice actor of Thief’s main character Garrett to voice Dishonored hero Corvo, in the sequel. 

Oh, and Tenchu? That game was published by FromSoftware - makers of Dark Souls. And they were actually going to make a new Tenchu game this year - but instead, used the series as inspiration for Miyazaki’s next game, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice which will feature stealth elements. 

It’s often true that the game that popularised a genre or mechanic wasn’t the one to actually invent it - just the first game to do it that was really successful. Doom didn’t invent the first-person shooter, after all, but we still called these games Doom clones. 

So while stealth mechanics can certainly be traced back to the early days of gaming, it’s not surprising that the genre really took off in a big way when it did. The shift to new technologies meant developers could really experiment with this style of playing - and the commercial success of Metal Gear Solid, and the critical response to Thief, suddenly made stealth something that everyone wanted to try.

Did I miss anything? Anything I could explain better? Anything I should get rid of? Any and all feedback appreciated!

Cheers

Mark