In a recent twitter post, the Metal Gear Solid series legend Hideo Kojima shares his surprise that it's been twenty years since Metal Gear Solid 2 was released. This game was one of the most influential in my childhood. It combined great artwork and direction with fun gameplay in the familiar tactical espionage format. My own interests in brush pen art as well as Japanese sumi-e ink art stem alone from the incredible covert art by Yoji Shinkawa, the leading artist and one of Kojima's most important creative partners.
The themes in this game are incredibly relevant today. With main plot points involving virtual reality training, private military companies, privacy and security, artificial intelligence, automation, misinformation, control of the media, and censorship, the game's ideas around these topics still hold very relevant twenty years later, especially with the rise and maturing of new computational platforms like the smart phone (which was only in its very primitive form of the Black Berry and the personal digital assistant / PDA back during the game's release in 2001 and throughout its development from 1996 to 2001) as well as virtual reality (which finally became mainstream relatively recently, starting with the Oculus VR / Oculus Rift Kickstarter in August 2012). Not to mention, the implications of censorship and mass surveillance revealed by the Snowden Revelations in June 2013.
Twenty years from today, will we have giant bipedal Metal Gear super suits fully autonomous censorship and media-controlling artificial intelligences like the ones depicted in Metal Gear Solid 2? Considering increasingly powerful parallel computation platforms (used for machine learning and training) and the advancements displayed by Boston Dynamics (acquired by Hyundai last December for ~$880M), in twenty years we could have much more.
I do hope that we hold onto the anti-nuclear proliferation messages that Hideo Kojima has laid forth in his Metal Gear Solid games.
Share your own thoughts below on Metal Gear Solid. I'd love to read them :)