Have you ever read a book, saw a movie, or played a video game and have the main character stick with you long after you finish the game? Solid Snake is such a person. Yes, I said person, not character.
I was introduced to Solid Snake came when I found a CD with a few game demo’s on it. Metal Gear Solid was one of those demo’s. I started playing, and when you saw Solid Snake swimming up to take off his gear and the soundtrack kicked in, you where in for something special. I didn’t know it at the time, but Metal Gear Solid would have a profound impact on me as a writer. The demo finished with Snake and Meryl shooting it out with a bunch of guards. I would play it again hoping the game would continue after that point, but it didn’t. I ended up buying Metal Gear Solid as part of a 3 in 1 pack at future shop.
I installed it and started playing, hoping the game won’t cut out after the shoot out with the guards. The game continued and Snake had to make his way around the base to another location. This time, underground to find and battle Revolver Ocelot. The impressive part about Metal Gear Solid and the series as a whole, has been the cut scenes. Some players are quick to say the cut scenes are intrusive and unnecessarily long. I have to admit, after awhile, you realize hearing the same dialog and seeing the same cut scenes over again can become tiresome.
It wasn’t the cut scenes that made this game impressive, it was discovering Solid Snake, and finding out what type of person he really was. Thinking Snake is a genetically mindless drone created as a killing machine for the government is a total misunderstanding of who Solid Snake really is. Hearing Snake talk to one of the other characters about love on a battlefield is mind-blowing, because you realize you aren’t playing a character, you interacting with a human, a human secret agent, who despite the fact he may not want to do the job of saving the world again, he gets up, puts on his sneaking suit, and does it anyway, because at the end of the day who else is going to do it?
My first play through, I managed to finished the game with the regular ending, not the special ending, with Meryl. I only managed to do that once several months later. Now, how did all this have an effect on me as a writer? A few years later, I had to put my career into perspective. I was studying software engineering, but I wanted more than that. I wanted to become a writer. That way, I can write novels, video games, and movies. When I started writing, my character template was Solid Snake. No matter what the character would turn out to be later on, Solid Snake was how the character began. Even when I read a novel, and I read a lot of spy novels, Solid Snake is the who I envisioned the main characters to be.
Now, to be fair, I haven’t played a lot of video games since then. So, if their are any character’s that have the depth of Solid Snake, I haven’t met them. Metal Gear Solid is so much more than just a stealth game, it’s a thesis, a statement from the creators about the world we live in. The game from time to time will discuss nuclear weapons and genetic manipulation. What interested me, was how the creators implemented their own ideas into a game. I could take my writing to the next level if I made a statement, placed my own point of view in my work. I had numerous views about politics, religion and sex. Sadly however, none of these came to pass(post for another day).
At the end of it all, Solid Snake is the template for all my other characters. That doesn’t mean they have to follow the same path as Snake did, but it really says something about the character, when your using him as a base. Snake is a killer, a solider who has been through war. He is also has emotions, and views that, while we may not all agree with, it certainly makes him different among all the other video game characters, it makes him human.
Leave your thoughts about characters that impacted you, be it from a movie, video game, or novel.
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