The Secret S-Rank that Makes Metal Gear Tick

Lots of thoughts come to my mind when I play Metal Gear games. I can’t keep up! One thing that I’d sometimes joke about but wouldn’t consider until I’ve become more analytical, is Hideo Kojima’s apparent fixation on butts. He’s no stranger to pioneering video game kinkering, whether it’s Olga Gorlukovich’s unshaved armpits or all the weird schoolboyery around Meryl in the first Solid game. But once character models became more than just a haphazard collection of triangles (and arguably even before, if you pay attention to the first Metal Gear, non-Solid), the creator couldn’t help but really put a lot of animation weight to the bottom.

He’s never denied it. Kojima explicitly said that he asked to give Snake a “nice butt” to make him more appealing. But by doing so (or misleading the interviewers), he stepped on (non-)accidental greatness in animation design. Specifically, how to communicate character states in such a way that I can immediately, without looking at a UI indicator or waiting for many more frames, understand what’s going on and what I can do about it.

1st-person games struggle with it even more, but it’s no easy walk in 3rd-person too. Lots of clunky, unresponsive control schemes in modern games are the direct result of animations going for too much realism and abandoning the main principles.

These are staging, exaggeration, cancelability:

make silhouettes clear with modeling and camera placement,

exaggerate actions to a degree for readability,

let players quickly fix mistakes by canceling input.

Metal Gear traditionally aces all the checkmarks and goes even beyond. Well, except for the recent Snake Eater Delta remake, but that’s a story for another time.

And glutes are the perfect muscles to carry out the animation intent! They’re huge. In fact, they’re the largest body muscles. So by kindly asking for a nice butt for players to look at, Kojima also asked for expressive animation that could’ve just not ended up there to this degree. Thanks to the poses in Metal Gear being so recognizable, I always know what’s going on, and despite all the decades of attention to rendering detail, they’re never afraid of being video-gamey and comically exaggerated. And this can’t be a coincidence, this is how great game direction produces some of the greates games.

So yeah, I like big butts in video games and I cannot lie!