The Year Stealth Games Got Serious

The story of the stealth game is a curious one. Because for much of gaming’s history, stealth wasn’t really a thing. Okay, sure - there were some early games that incorporated hide-and-seek gameplay. The Sega arcade game 005 had guards with flashlights, and you had to wind through a warehouse without entering those big yellow beams. Castle Wolfenstein had you putting on disguises to saunter past SS Stormtroopers. And the first two Metal Gear games already had Solid Snake crawling through vents and hiding in cardboard boxes.

But still, these games were few and far between - and practically non-existent in the years after Metal Gear 2’s release in 1990. Until, 1998 - when three huge stealth games suddenly appeared all in the same year. This changed everything, and from then one, we couldn’t seem to hide from games that are all about, well, hiding. You’ve got huge stealth franchises like Splinter Cell, Hitman and Dishonored. Indie sneak ‘em ups like The Swindle and The Marvellous Miss Take.

And stealth bits in most major games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Red Dead Redemption 2. So, what were these three games - and why did it take until 1998 for stealth to be taken seriously? Things kicked off in August of 1998, when Tenchu: Stealth Assassins was released on PlayStation. This is a game about being a ninja who sneaks through pitch black villages - and, as the name might suggest, it’s all about staying unseen and then striking from the shadows.

Then, in October, the PlayStation saw another critical stealth game. Metal Gear Solid - subtitled “Tactical Espionage Action”. The game stars Solid Snake, a soldier who prefers to sneak past enemies than take them on face-to-face. And he’s got all sorts of skills and gadgets for doing just that - like being able to crawl under objects, choke enemies out, or hide in a cardboard box. Finally, just as the year was about to finish, Looking Glass Studios released the first-person game Thief: The Dark Project on PC, in November of 1998.

Like these other games, Thief certainly lets you try and kill enemies - but you’ll likely end up dead. You’re better off sticking to the shadows, and using tools like your trusty blackjack to knock enemies out. Amazingly, while these games might have been early, formative stabs at the genre - they actually established most of the core tenants of stealth game design that we still see today. For starters, and most obviously, all of the games have you start missions in a neutral, non-hostile state.

Guards will move around without any knowledge of your position - or even your existence. And the goal is, largely, to keep things that way. To do this, you’ll need to think about both sight and sound. Enemies can spot you, unless you hide behind cover, stick to the rooftops, or crouch in the shadows. And enemies can hear you, so you need to move quietly and think carefully about the materials you’re walking on. In Thief, soft leaves didn’t make much noise, but running across a hard tiled floor will certainly alert guards.

To help you with this, all three games saw fit to give you extra information about whether you’re safe or spotted. Tenchu has a Ki Meter, which changes colour to represent the awareness of nearby guards and it also has a number telling you how close the nearest guard is. Metal Gear Solid offers up the Soliton radar, which shows the exact vision cone of enemies as they patrol - but it will jam if you get spotted, putting you at risk of running directly into more foes.

And Thief has a Light Gem at the bottom of the screen which tells you how visible you are - plus, guards are extremely vocal about their current state as they will shout out when they’ve seen something suspicious. Information like this is critically important in stealth games, as it removes the ambiguity of whether or not you’re about to be spotted. If you are spotted, though, the guards in these games won’t immediately open fire.

There’s not just a binary switch between being hidden and being seen - but guards have a middle state where they’re merely suspicious and will investigate suspect sights and sounds. This gives you a bit of leeway to make (and recover) from a small mistake, without flipping the entire system into alert mode. But you can also use this suspicious state to your own benefit. All of these games hit on this idea of manipulating guard AI to your own needs.

In Metal Gear Solid, you can knock on walls to lure guards one way, while you slip past the other. In Tenchu, you can trick enemies into eating poisoned food. And in Thief, you can use noisemaker arrows to distract foes, or deliberately make noise to lure guards into a trap. If you do get completely rumbled, guards will eventually give up their hunt if you manage to slip away and hide. In Metal Gear Solid, there’s even a countdown to show you how long you need to stay hidden for before the guard’s state is reset.

This allows you to shift the game back to its original, stealthy state without having to reload your save game or kill everyone in sight. Those core tenants are shared across the three titles, but the games also had their own, unique contributions to the genre. Tenchu had the grappling hook, which could be freely aimed at rooftops and cause you to zip up above enemies. Combine this with a generous jump and you’ve got a game that was mostly about using the verticality of levels to stay unseen - before dropping down to silently dispatch foes.

We’d see this pop up in games like the Arkham series, where you can use the upper areas of the level to plan your next move and hide from sight. Tenchu also had cinematic stealth kill animations, which we’d see in a bunch of games going forward. Metal Gear Solid’s main contribution was the radar, which clearly showed where you would and would not be safe from each enemy’s line of sight. Games like The Swindle would also show this info, though: plastered on the game world itself, to save you from watching a tiny box in the corner of the screen for the entire game.

And Thief had lots to add. This game’s levels are open and interconnected affairs, giving you multiple pathways to your goal: which is often to pinch some kind of sword, sceptre, or jewel from the innermost sanctum of a well guarded mansion. Games like Hitmand and Dishonored share this level design philosophy. The game also lets you manipulate the space to your own liking: using water arrows to extinguish candles and create areas of darkness, or use moss arrows to create silent tiles to walk on.

This is kind of rare, but Splinter Cell does let you shoot out the lights. And, on higher difficulties, Thief forces you to play through missions without killing guards. Games like Mark of the Ninja would introduce their own rewards for playing in a non-lethal manner. So, the question I’m left with, is “why 1998”? How did the stealth genre go from drips-and-drabs in the years before 1998, to a full on Cambrian explosion in the years afterwards?

Well I think it’s down to two things: changing technology, and the nature of influence. In terms of technology, this period in the mid- to late-90s gave us the invention of 3D, polygonal games, and CDs instead of cartridges and floppy disks. And this new tech led to all sorts of new genres, like open-world hi-jinx in Grand Theft Auto, rhythm action games in Parappa the Rapper, and survival horror in Alone in the Dark.

Developers were really experimenting with what games could be in this era - and that included making games that were primarily about hiding from enemies, instead of engaging them. Technology was certainly at the heart of Thief, as well. The game relied on CD quality audio to work, the way sound propagates through the environment was revolutionary at the time, and the guard AI was so advanced that it was a broken, buggy mess up until the last few months of development.

But the design of the game was inspired by lesser known titles, like the submarine simulator Silent Service. On a podcast, Thief’s original designer Ken Levine talked about the power dynamics of submarines, saying… KEN LEVINE: “How powerful you are when you are unseen, and how weak you are when you are spotted. When the enemy can’t detect you, you’re incredibly powerful. You have these torpedos and you can strike unseen.

But when you get spotted by the destroyers there’s this panic because you’re not going to be able to duke it out with them, toe to toe. And that’s so the opposite of what shooters were”. But it’s interesting that Levine would need to go to such a place for inspiration - because all of the key stealth tenants I’ve talked about here actually already existed in another game. Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake was as much a stealth game as anything released in 1998 - it had a radar to show enemy locations.

It had loud metal grates that would alert guards if you ran over them. It had guards who would become suspicious and investigate sounds. You could lure enemies around by knocking on walls. And you could reset the game state to be neutral if you managed to hide. But it’s not that surprising that it wasn’t all that influential. The developers at Looking Glass likely never played it, seeing as the game was exclusive to a relatively obscure computer called the MSX2 and was only released in Japan.

(The worldwide NES sequel to Metal Gear, Snake’s Revenge, is a completely different game, and is pretty terrible). Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima was basically done with the series after Solid Snake, preferring to focus on graphic adventure stuff like Policenauts. But, again, technology changed things. 3D graphics gave Kojima a reason to revisit his sneaky roots, saying, “For me, Metal Gear as a series was complete, but at that point I thought I would be able do what I originally intended to do with these polygons in real time.

For example, if you are hiding under a table you can change the point of view, or hiding in a locker you can let the player see how it looks from inside the locker". And with this game now being a huge, mainstream, worldwide success - developers suddenly took note. Splinter Cell, for example, was made with the explicit purpose of being a rival to the in-development Metal Gear Solid 2. And Volume is directly influenced by MGS.

And Thief is name-checked as the inspiration behind a bunch of stealth greats, too. Splinter Cell also took ideas from here, like the light meter on Sam Fisher’s back. Mark of the Ninja was Nels Anderson’s attempt to turn Thief into a side scroller. And Dishonored is practically a spiritual successor, even down to getting the voice actor of Thief’s main character Garrett to voice Dishonored hero Corvo, in the sequel.

Oh, and Tenchu? Well, that game was published by FromSoftware - makers of Dark Souls. And they were actually going to make a new Tenchu game this year - but instead, decided to use the series as inspiration for Miyazaki’s next game, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, which will feature stealth elements. So it’s often true that the game that popularised a genre or mechanic wasn’t the one to actually invent it - just the first game to do it that was really successful.

Doom didn’t invent the first-person shooter, after all, but we still called these games Doom clones. So Metal Gear 2 might be the actual grandfather of stealth games - but with the commercial success of Metal Gear Solid and the critical success of Thief - two games that came around during the technological boom of the late 90s - it’s easy to see why 1998 is seen as the year that stealth games truly got serious.