In 2008, Raven Software designer Manveer Heir played the original MSX Metal Gear to completion as part of his “Design Lesson 101” column — pick a game, finish it, learn something about design. What he found was a difficulty curve running backwards from the modern convention. The opening is the hardest part, and the game gets progressively easier.

His argument is that this does more than lower the stakes. It changes which skill the game is actually testing.

The early game, where the difficulty lives:

  • Snake starts with no weapons and no items — punching is the only attack available.
  • Rations are scarce; being spotted by a patrol usually means death or serious injury.
  • Stealth is not a style choice, it is the only viable route: sneaking past patrols is how you reach new areas at all.

Then the power curve runs the other way:

  • Rescuing prisoners raises Snake’s rank, which raises ammo capacity, maximum life, and how many rations he can carry.
  • Later weapons — grenade launcher, missile launcher — arrive on top of that.
  • Enemy numbers and strength do rise, but not enough to offset the player’s growth.

By the back half, being caught has lost its consequences. Heir stops sneaking and starts running room to room looking for the right key card, retracing steps and opening every door. The obstacle has moved from enemies to navigation, and caution is thrown into the wind.

That is the part worth keeping: “Normally games get harder as you go, but the core mechanic of the game stays the same. When the core mechanic is no longer necessary, a new way of playing is introduced.” Most difficulty design assumes a fixed loop with a rising challenge. Metal Gear inverts both at once, so the opening plays as a stealth game and the ending plays as an exploration game on the same disc.

Heir is honest about the limit of the claim — this may have been bad balancing or an artifact of porting the MSX original to the PS2, not Kojima’s intent, and he does not pretend to know. His point stands either way: the game did what he did not expect, and that surprise is what made it memorable.