10 Original Instalments In Iconic Video Game Franchises You Must Play

6. Metal Gear

The original Metal Gear is certainly outdated, but in a really enjoyable way. There are wonderfully dumb character names like Shoot Gunner and Machinegun Kid to fight, the guard A.I. is dumb as a post and you can finish the whole thing in under two hours, but, BUT, if you're anything of a Metal Gear fan - or just want to see where the very idea of stealth in video games came from - you have to see how it all began.

Brilliantly, thanks to Hideo Kojima originally wanting to do a full-on action game, the amount of bullets and enemies flying across the screen completely bogged down the basic MSX hardware his team were working on. The decision was then taken to avoid enemies instead, thereby somewhat accidentally birthing stealth.

Many of the foundational aspects of Metal Gear are still here - Big Boss' end speech in particular actually ties in very well to the end of MGS V: The Phantom Pain, though it came some 28 years earlier, and providing you can sit through the slow unlocking of items and occasional bewilderment of where to go, it's simply astonishing to see the seeds of the franchise appear in such raw form.