11 Facts You Never Knew About The Development Of Metal Gear Solid

4. The Developers Designed The Original Game's Levels With LEGO

Although it was a massive shift for the industry, the transition from 2D to 3D games wasn't quite as radical you'd think. At least in the early days, most 3D games played out exactly the same as the two-dimensional ones that came before, only with worse graphics and characters that were a nightmare to control. However it was still a big step up for the developers, who were used to operating within a top-down or side-on, two dimensional space, and thus the studio working on the the original Metal Gear Solid would design the game's levels using LEGO, to get a feel for how a part of the game should flow. It might seem like a convoluted way of doing things, but ripping down a terrible LEGO level is far easier than throwing away a month's worth of now-useless code.