The Snake and the Wheel: The Cyclical Nature of Metal Gear

Fittingly, then, what made Metal Gear Solid distinctive was the way it approached the age of polygons ushered into the mainstream living room by Sony's PlayStation -- a method remarkably similar to the one Nintendo employed for its first 3D Zelda adventure, Ocarina of Time, which would arrive less than a month later. Rather than reinvent the series whole-cloth, Zelda creative lead Shigeru Miyamoto and Metal Gear auteur Hideo Kojima each looked to their series' respective defining two-dimensional masterpiece and effectively recreated it, fleshing out the action with another dimension but changing very little of how the underlying systems and tools worked (and worked together).