A Retrospective Look On The Popularity Of The Stealth Game From Its 2D Roots To The Present Day.
On paper, stealth games sounds like a laughable concept. One of the most universally accepted motivations for playing video games is for escapism and hiding from your enemies rather than, say, shooting them until their body resembles a particularly viscous lump of jam doesn’t seem like a particularly fulfilling fantasy. Its a thought that has bugged me for a while and, with the reboot of the Thief series coming later this month, lets look at three of the most innovative and convention setting stealth franchise’s to try and find us some answers. Partially to learn a bit about how this industry has developed and partially so I can justify how I bought 5 stealth games on steam in a massive impulse buy.
Metal Gear
The first stealth game to ever be created was 005 but the first popular stealth game was Metal Gear. The game started you off with nothing but a pack of cigarettes and sent you on your way. You could attack the guards head on if you wanted but you weren’t likely to last long if you did. Put yourself in the shoes of a person playing this. Up until now, games have been all about fighting your way to the end but the game still did well due to game-play that now seems simplistic but back then, it was truly innovative. Metal Gear 2 raised the now established bar by letting the player distract guards crouch and crawl to hide in small spaces and use a radar to plan ahead not to mention that the AI had been improved phenomenally. Guards could travel from screen to screen and could even look diagonally! This stuff may seem too general to be exited about now but it was a big dead back then. Metal Gear Solid arrived in 1998 and cemented the conventions of the genre for years to come. The game stayed mostly true to Metal Gear 2 in terms of game-play albeit with a 3D camera perspective but what really set metal gear solid apart from its predecessors and indeed all military games is its deep and engaging story which is told through long and excessive cut-scenes. This heavy use of cut-scenes and codec (radio) calls has earned this game both the adoration and ire of gamers all across the world but the game series is the undeniable reason that stealth games are even a thing.
Thief
Released around the same time as Metal Gear Solid, Thief: The Dark Project strayed from the stealth conventions established by games like Metal Gear and Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, most notably for keeping the camera in a first person perspective. The game featured some innovative new ideas such as being able to lean to see around corners without exposing your body and telling how visible you were. You could become as invisible as a ghosts shadow in darkness so players would stick to the shadows instinctively rather than because they were told to. In parallel with light’s role in the stealth, sound was also an issue. In other stealth games, you would be fine as long as you moved slowly but in Thief, you would make more noise creeping along ceramic tiles than if you were running on a carpet. All of these things to consider made the game a grueling challenge especially on the harder difficulties but all these innovative ideas combined with the generally non-linear feel of the levels made for an amazing experience. Thief 2: The Metal Age remained mostly unchanged except for removing the annoying supernatural enemies and making the levels massive and completely non-linear which focused the game-play into a beautiful experience which has inspired future stealth games like Dishonored and Splinter Cell. Thief 2 was and still is my favorite stealth game to date.
Hitman
Hitman is the youngest franchise of the three and is on this list because, despite being one of the most notable stealth franchises, its not completely a stealth game. If anything, it feels more like a modern point and click adventure game in that you ideally kill your targets by setting up elaborate accidents that follow the same elaborate tangents of logic as those games do……That or you can just shoot them in the face. There is stealth mind you but not in the way that the previous games did it. Rather than avoiding being seen, you hide in plain sight through a completely innovative disguise system that allows you to suit yourself up in guard uniforms or other VIP’s that would have access to a room you need to get into. These disguises can be found in certain areas in a level or can be torn off any old person wearing them as long as they are incapacitated to some degree. The series has had several installments over the years with blood money being the peak but whichever installment of the series you play, serving up death on a silver platter has never been so stylish.
Well, If this little introspective has taught us anything, its that the conventions of the genre are flexible as all hell but in conclusion to the original question. stealth games as we know them today seemed to be a freak accident. When Metal Gear was given to Hideo Kojima, it wasn’t even intended to be a stealth game but that’s just how Kojima decided to set this game apart from the other military games of the time and since then, the genre has grown, first seeming to be an amusing gimmick before being innovated by the likes of the three above franchises to the point where its now one of the most notable game genres this generation and the go-to genre for big games about espionage, counter-terrorism, thievery and assassination.
