10 Moments That Literally Stopped Video Games

10. Finding Meryl's Codec Frequency - Metal Gear Solid

Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid franchise is jam-packed with moments which quite literally stop the show, peeling back the fourth wall to wink at the player.

But one that actually stopped many players from progressing at all occurred early in the original Metal Gear Solid, when Colonel Campbell asks players to contact his "niece" Meryl by codec.

To obtain her codec frequency, Campbell suggests you look "on the back of the CD case," which many players assumed was a reference to the MO disc given to Solid Snake by Kenneth Baker a little earlier on.

But there's no way to interact with the MO disc, leaving countless players stumped on how the hell to reach Meryl.

Beyond simply brute-forcing a solution by trying every single codec frequency manually, it turns out that the number you need to call, 140.15, is quite literally on the back cover of the game case itself.

If you rented Metal Gear Solid or played a dodgy copy, though, you'd need to run to your local video game store and take a quick gander at the back of the case, this being 1998 where large swaths of the population didn't yet have home Internet connections. Imagine that.