The History of the Stealth Game: From Metal Gear to Splinter Cell and Everything in Between

By Kirk McKeand

A celebration and a history of the development of stealth video games, featuring revealing interviews from industry insiders.

For many, video games are like magic. They hide in the dark and then appear from nowhere, fully formed. Based on over a dozen firsthand interviews that cover genre-defining games and the titles that inspired them — Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Deus Ex, Dishonored, Assassin’s Creed, Hitman, Splinter Cell, Prey, The Last of Us Part II, and more — this book shines a flashlight into the shadowy corners of game development history, uncovering the untold stories behind these formative titles.

These insider interviews cover development struggles, internal conflicts, changes in direction, and insight into the reasoning and challenges behind specific mechanics and development decisions.

There’s the story of how Thief was developed, in part, by an indie band. It covers Metal Gear Solid’s localisation issues and the Americanisation of Hideo Kojima’s seminal stealth series, along with a page from the original Metal Gear Solid design document. Elsewhere, one of IO Interactive’s founders explains why Hitman’s Agent 47 is inspired by Coca-Cola, the creator of Assassin’s Creed tells us his vision for the future of the series, and there are plenty of surprises besides. Rather than looking back at the genre as a whole, it traces a line through and connects the dots via personal stories and anecdotes from the people who were there.

Foreword written by Arkane’s Harvey Smith.

Praise for The History of the Stealth Game

“McKeand’s lively book is no dry history lesson. . . . It’s sharp, funny and peppered with surprising anecdotes (you’ll never look at Mike Bithell the same way again).” —Edge Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399096928

Book preview

Introduction

Strategy and tactics win conflicts. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about modern warfare or negotiating with terrorists (read: your children), nuance will always win the day. Thinking a few steps ahead, laying out the overall strategy, and being tactical during its implementation. Sure, sometimes kicking an electronic appliance can work, but it’s much more satisfying when you diagnose the problem and fix it.

This is what stealth games are all about. Where shooters are concerned with instant reactions – moving the mouse cursor and clicking on enemy heads – stealth games are about planning and execution. They’re rarely about crouching behind a box and waiting for your hit points to tick back up when you’re injured. Instead, they capture the tension of actual conflict by making both you and the enemy vulnerable. Low hit points.

I’ve spent the past year talking to some of the developers behind formative stealth games about what makes them special, why they’re difficult to make, and what the past, present, and future looks like for the genre.

This book is a celebration of stealth games, highlighting some of the most influential works and speaking to some of the people behind them. It’s about the challenges they faced, and the changes the games went through to become what they are today. It’s also about the genre, the industry, the audience, how games were inspired by what came before, and how stealth games could evolve from here.

To cover such a wide range of topics, I’ve interviewed over a dozen people, transcribing hours and hours of candid conversations where we dig into design ethos, creative choices, business challenges, personal struggles, and more, digging up some surprising stories along the way.

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Saying video games are big business is like telling someone a headbutt to the bridge of the nose hurts. Despite the incessant growth of the industry, however, online multiplayer games dominate the market. The death of the single-player game was exaggerated, but many younger players prefer a healthy dollop of social bonding with their screen time. Less interested in experiencing a good story, they just want to hang out with their friends in a virtual space. Believe me, I know. I’m a games journalist with essentially unlimited access to video games and my kids play Minecraft and Fortnite almost exclusively. They don’t give a single shit.

The single-player games that do sell are generally blockbusters like Sony’s prestige first-party titles – God of War and Marvel’s Spider-Man – or mammoth role-playing games (RPGs) such as The Witcher 3 and Mass Effect. People want flashy graphics, instant action, or stories that last for hundreds of hours. When it comes to stealth games, market analysis says ‘no’.

It’s a shame, because it’s a genre that’s consistently excellent. There are lots of terrible shooters, but there are only a handful of poor stealth games. There are also plenty of brilliant non-stealth games that are, let’s admit it, secretly stealth games.

For example, Cyberpunk 2077 might be called an action RPG on the box, but you can play as a sneaky cyborg, hacking open doorways and using a katana to silently slice up your enemies.

Skyrim might be a fantasy RPG about dragons and wizards, but you can still creep around the entire game firing arrows from the shadows. Arguably, playing Skyrim as a stealth archer is the most enjoyable way to experience it, and Skyrim is one of the most popular games ever made – hence why it’s been ported to everything outside of a smart fridge. (Actually, my editor is telling me it’s been ported to a smart fridge as well. And a pregnancy test. Damn.)

Then there’s the fact that one of the most popular levels from one of the most popular game series of all time – Call of Duty¹ – is a rudimentary stealth sequence where you creep through Chernobyl in a ghillie suit. It might be the best video game mission where you play as a hedge that’s ever been made.

That’s why I believe it’s time for a stealth renaissance. People want to play games tactically and with guile. There’s an audience for it. I wouldn’t bother spending a year of my life writing this book if there wasn’t. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, so tell your friends to grab a copy, yeah? They can find it in the dark corner of the local bookstore, which is totally by design, I promise.

Out of the Shadows

Alone survivor crawls through the wet shrubbery of a dilapidated park. Coated in mud and blood, she inches forward as the sound of coordinated whistling comes from just over a grassy verge. To her left, audible footsteps and the glint of a torch. She waits for her moment, muscles taut, and jumps up, grabbing the enemy from behind. His eyes bulge in terror for a split second before turning blank as the survivor plunges a knife into his neck, causing a crimson cascade to gush from the wound. The killer sinks back down and folds into the foliage, crawling away as more whistles ring out.

There’s something about stealth that makes you feel clever, like an apex predator cornering its prey. Sure, outwitting an enemy in an online shooter provides similar thrills, but doesn’t a flanking maneuver kind of loop back to stealth? You obscured your body with geometry and came at your opponent from an unexpected angle, like a cat in the long grass wiggling its backside before pouncing on a pigeon.

Some of my favourite moments from Sea of Thieves – a game about sailing across a vast ocean and digging up treasure – are grounded in stealth mechanics. Like the time another player stowed away on our ship and stole a vault key, or when I lost a pursuing player by pretending to turn around an island, only to turn back in the opposite direction as soon as we were obscured by a nearby volcano.

At their core, stealth games are about positioning – being in the right place at the right time and knowing when to leap into action. It feels as if, more than ever, the genre is poised to spring up from the foliage and take us all by surprise once more.

One of the biggest video games of 2020 was The Last of Us Part II, an action/horror game with stealth elements. It’s the game I described in this chapter’s opening paragraph. The Last of Us Part II is a genre-blended masterpiece that marries the best parts of linear games with open-ended level design to cater for sneaky players. The first game in the series had rudimentary stealth mechanics, allowing you to crouch behind cover and throw bottles and bricks to distract enemies or draw them close enough to be choked out. The Last of Us Part II doubled down on stealth, introducing two seemingly simple changes: the ability to jump, and the ability to go prone. Allowing you to crawl flat on your stomach added more nuance to its stealth mechanics, letting you snake through grass to creep around enemies, to hide under cars, or to close a gap while concealing yourself with low walls. The addition of the jump button added a layer of verticality to the experience, giving you the option to climb onto rooftops, find vantage points, and even jump down onto unaware enemies from above. While it can be played as a shooter, the game’s level design, mechanics, and dynamic AI all scream at you to play smart – to outwit your opponents. On its harder difficulties, where ammo and resources are scarce, stealth is the only way to survive.

‘The most direct impact was on the vision system of the enemy perception model,’ co-director Anthony Newman tells me. ‘The Last of Us Part II had a much more nuanced system that had to handle many more cases than The Last of Us Part I due to the addition of both prone and stealth vegetation (grass, etc). There were three stances for your character: standing, crouch, and prone. Similarly, there were three heights of stealth vegetation: prone grass that came up to your ankles (we used this quite liberally), crouch height vegetation that would cover you completely in crouch, and standing vegetation (two-meter-tall grass that we only used in one set-piece encounter, the cornfields of the Seraphite village.)

‘The question was always: how long does it take this enemy to notice you? How long when you are crouched in prone-height grass at 20 meters? What about when you are five meters away, all the way prone in crouch-height grass? Should they see you at all? All of these timers, of course, have to be modulated across the different difficulty modes as well!’

The addition of prone also unlocked the ability to crawl under cars and hide, with a dynamic animation system seeing the protagonist shift and roll around depending on the direction you’re looking. From this position you’re still able to shoot, but you’re otherwise vulnerable if one of the pairs of legs walking past decides to squat and peek under the vehicle.

‘This idea, though thrilling, required an intimidating number of cases to handle in order to work across many aspects of AI, from perception, to search behaviors, to melee,’ Newman explains. ‘Each prone hiding spot could only be of a certain depth: any deeper and melee enemies who had no guns wouldn’t be able to reach you with their hands once they were aware of you, so you could never be more than two meters from an edge to the outside. We hand-marked them with special splines to designate them as prone spaces. When in search, these would hint enemies to the prone spaces, and they would play unique look under performances based around a reference point placed on that spline (these integrate incredibly fluidly into AI navigation thanks to our new motion-matching animation system).

‘These special splines were also used to create animation reference points for the outrageously complicated prone pull out system that let enemies drag you out from underneath your hiding spot. I think it’s fair to say that the prone pull out system on its own was more complex than all of Joel’s melee in The Last of Us Part I combined. The amount of cleverness required to try and get the player out from under there in a smooth motion without cutting the camera was staggering. What if the enemy is pulling you out by your feet rather than your shoulders? What if they are coming at you from the side, ninety degrees to your right? What if you are supine (lying face up), rather than prone? Ok, now handle a sloped surface as well.

‘Prone had such far-reaching effects: how do hit reactions to gunshots look when you’re prone? What does it look like to die to fire from a molotov when you are supine? How does an infected person attack you if you are prone? A dog? In the end, the team rose to the occasion to handle these many cases at the polish level fans expect, making for a marked evolution to the franchise.’

This is why stealth games are so difficult to create. A single design decision can cascade and create dozens of new problems for the developers to solve. All of this is in service of giving the players an experience that feels dynamic. While every situation needs to be readable and the outcome predictable, developers also need to retain the element of surprise.

‘I’ve always adored the emotional resonance of hiding in the shadows, having the information that you need to control a situation, and having your illusion shattered by something unexpected,’ Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory producer Julian Gerighty explains. ‘It’s all about player agency and controlling the rhythm of play.’

That’s one of the things that makes the genre special – the ability to control the pace. Modern stealth games usually have some kind of ‘plan B’ for when you’re spotted. In The Last of Us Part II, this comes in the form of a variety of weapons, bombs, and melee abilities. For Metal Gear Solid V (2015), the game slows time when you are spotted, allowing you to shoot the guard before they can alert their friends on the radio. You can fight or flee – escape the enemy’s line of sight and hide, and eventually they will resume their patrols, allowing you to try again.

Losing pursuers in this way is a staple of the Assassin’s Creed series, which allows you to evade combat by free-running across rooftops before diving into a hay bale. You have to suspend your disbelief a little when someone goes back to staring at a wall after being face to face with their would-be killer, but there’s an element of that in all video games – ‘What do you mean I can’t take two bullets to the head in real life?’ you scream. ‘I demand to speak to God.’ If you can accept a bit of NPC idiocy, stealth games are a convincing illusion. Importantly, if enemies didn’t have the memory reserves of a goldfish, stealth games would be a frustrating slog. It’s a balancing act – AI must be convincing, but not too much so.

Within just three days of launch, The Last of Us Part II had sold four million copies, making it the fastest-selling PlayStation 4 (PS4) exclusive to date. Traditional stealth games with strict fail states and hardcore difficulty have struggled to replicate this success, but that’s why the genre has been forced to evolve. To map that evolution out, let’s load up an old save and go right back to the start – back to a time before save states even existed.

Pac to the Start

While Metal Gear (1987) is often cited as the birthplace of stealth, you can see the foundations of the genre much earlier – in the arcades. Pac-Man was released in the US by Midway in 1980. A year later, around 250 million games of Pac-Man were being played in America each week.

Japanese games designer Toru Iwatani created Pac-Man as a response to the violent arcade games of the time, such as Space Invaders (1978) and Galaxian (1979). In those titles, the goal was to destroy the enemy with a hail of bullets. Pac-Man, for the most part, wasn’t an aggressor at all. The little fella just wanted to pop some pills in peace.

In Pac-Man the goal is to gobble up all the fruit you can while avoiding ghosts hunting you down. It’s a game about evasion rather than outright stealth – you never actually hide, you just intuit enemy patrol paths and make sure your route doesn’t intersect with them. Occasionally, you get access to a power-up that allows you to gobble up the ghosts, turning the tables and forcing the cherry-bothering phantoms to retreat from you. When you boil it down to its core, Pac-Man grabbing a power-up and becoming the aggressor isn’t that different to The Last of Us Part II’s Ellie lying in wait before plunging a blade into someone’s neck.

‘Pac-Man is a good one,’ Arkane’s Harvey Smith agrees. ‘One of my favorite analogies that I heard from the guys at Looking Glass was early submarine simulators, where you’re in the dark, and you don’t know if an enemy is there. So you ping and an enemy is there but then you can’t ping again immediately – the enemy might have moved and it might be in another spot. That sort of information economy, and trying to move without getting pinged yourself, was influential on Looking Glass when thinking about Thief.’

Pac-Man’s pacifist origins are reflected elsewhere in the genre, with many modern games in the genre