Early video game box art could be pretty hit-or-miss, but one way a publisher could avoid producing terrible retro game box art was to take inspiration from pre-existing work, just as the original Metal Gear game did with an image from The Terminator. In fact, Metal Gear’s cover is a more than inspired: It’s a complete copy of The Terminator, aping an image of Kyle Reese almost exactly.
Metal Gear, the first game in what would become Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series, was released in Japan for the MSX2 computer in 1987 and was later ported to the Famicom and NES. It featured pixel-art graphics from an overhead perspective and popularized the stealth video game genre, complete with the signature exclamation points appearing over alerted enemies’ heads that Metal Gear Solid fans know today.
Three years before Metal Gear’s launch in Japan, James Cameron’s legendary sci-fi film The Terminator released to commercial success, cementing itself as a classic. Someone at Konami apparently took notice of Michael Biehn’s Terminator character Kyle Reese, because, as Reddit user wokeaspie recently shared, Metal Gear’s box art clearly traced an image of Kyle from the movie. Konami altered things slightly when creating the cover image of Solid Snake, removing the object from Kyle’s mouth and adding gloves, but the face, gun, jacket, belt, and more small details are almost exactly the same as the Terminator still.
Knowing Kojima’s love of movies, one might assume he specifically wanted Snake to resemble Kyle - especially since Kojima has said making “A Hideo Kojima Game” means he’s involved in every step of that game’s creation. In reality, Kojima likely had nothing to do with the box art. As compiled by USGamer, two other early Konami games in now-famous franchises had box art that copied imagery from other sources: Simon Belmont’s pose on the original Castlevania cover resembles the subject of Frank Frazetta 1972 painting The Norseman, and the characters on the original Contra box art look like knock-off versions of Dutch from Predator, John Rambo from Rambo, and a Xenomorph from Alien.
As one Reddit user commented on wokeaspie’s post, “everyone noticed and knew” Snake was meant to look like Kyle in the ’80s, leading said user to imagine Snake as Kyle while playing. While such blatant copying is much less common in the triple-A gaming space today, it likely helped Konami attract fans to Metal Gear, building a foundation for the franchise’s success after the launch of Metal Gear Solid on the PlayStation.
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Metal Gear released in Japan on July 13, 1987, for the MSX2 computer.
