The Bluffer’s Guide To Stealth Games
We’re sneaking out with secret history of the stealth genre with intel provided by developers behind Metal Gear Solid 4, Republique, The Swindle, Styx, and Desperadoes: Dead Or Alive
Find out how early games like Castle Wolfenstein and Metal Gear helped establish the popular genre
From the likes of Space Invaders to Call Of Duty, so much of videogame history is about conflict. It was always inevitable that a strand would emerge in opposition to this, exploring a different kind of thrill.
“So much of videogames is shooting people in the face, stealth can be a really good alternate way of introducing tension and strife to a game,” says Dan Marshall, developer of indie roguelike heist game The Swindle, on the appeal of the stealth genre. “You know that old thing of you either end a film with an explosion or a court case? The stealth genre is the court case alternative.”
A number of titles have had arguments made on their behalf as the first stealth game – the likes of Pac-man and Lupin III being a couple of examples. However, while these games require you to stay out of the way of your pursuers, they lack the sense that you’re truly hiding from an enemy that can switch from a passive to active state when they spot you – something which we would argue is a fundamental component of the genre.
The first game to fit those criteria is Manbiki Shounen, or Shoplifting Boy, developed by Hiroshi Suzuki for the Commodore PET and published in 1979. In that game you must steal items, represented by dollar signs, from the shelves of a 7/11 convenience store while staying out of view of a shopkeeper who will grab you if he spots you down one of his aisles.
Credit must also go to 1981’s Castle Wolfenstein and 1984 sequel Beyond Castle Wolfenstein for innovating other stealth devices that we now
recognise as core mechanics of the genre. Not only did Castle Wolfenstein allow you to sneak past guards on your mission to steal secret plans, you could also don an enemy uniform to disguise yourself, fooling lower level guards. Beyond Castle Wolfenstein continued in this vein, allowing you to dupe guards with your fake papers, bribe them if you didn’t have the correct pass and drag dead bodies out of the view of patrolling guards.
Other notable early attempts include Sega’s 1981 arcade title 005, which featured warehouse sections where you had to stay out of the torch beam of guards by hiding behind crates, 1985
8-bit title Saboteur, which forced you to deal with or avoid security systems, and 1986’s Infiltrator, which mixed helicopter flying missions with base infiltrations that use a Wolfenstein-style paper system to allow you to trick guards. We’ll also mention 1986’s The Great Escape as you have to avoid being seen acting out of routine by guards.
In the following year, in 1987, a game that’s true significance to the stealth genre has only retrospectively been recognised was released for the MSX2 and, soon after, the NES: Metal Gear. The game features many of the elements
for which Hideo Kojima’s iconic series is now famous: starting the game unarmed and having to explore to find equipment, a transceiver that allows allies to call in and give you intel, and an alert system that would see enemies search for you after you were spotted, encouraging you to hide until the alert’s time expired and guard’s returned to their usual patrols.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake built on these systems in 1990, adding the ability for enemies to hear sounds and for Snake to crawl to avoid making noise on certain surfaces, for example.
Despite these early explorations of the possibilities of stealth gameplay the genre hadn’t really broken through into the mainstream and things, ironically, remained pretty quite for stealth throughout most of the Nineties. This all changed in a defining year for the genre, a year that thrust stealth into the limelight, dovetailing with the emergent dominance of 3D gaming ushered in by the Playstation to change videogaming for ever.
“1998 was the year of stealth for me,” says Metal Gear Solid 4 producer and designer of
Republique, Ryan Payton, on the year that changed stealth. He points out that stealth isn’t the easiest of genres to get into and argues that the incredible games released in 1998 encouraged players to give the genre a chance and see what it can do. “Stealth is a fascinating genre in that it’s not instantly accessible nor enjoyable, and can be rather frustrating at times,” he says. “I fell in love with the stealth genre not because of its prodding mechanics, but because great games like Metal Gear Solid, Tenchu and Thief created interesting worlds built atop the mechanic.”
The brutally difficult Tenchu: Stealth Assassins hit first on the Playstation, The game is notable for the inclusion of a grappling hook that allowed your chosen ninja – you could play as Rikimaru or Ayame – to easily stalk the rooftops, dropping down to stealth kill the enemies guarding your assassination targets. “Truth be told, I didn’t play Metal Gear Solid at launch because I was so engrossed in Tenchu!” Ryan reveals. “I love MGS and can say it truly changed my life, but I think Tenchu is severely underrated and would love to see a proper reboot one of these days.”
Next came Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima’s 3D reboot of the Metal Gear series, again releasing on the Playstation. “It’s hard to undersell how important the original Metal Gear Solid was to the industry,” Ryan reflects. “Its cinematic presentation was paired with deep gameplay, its sophisticated and heartfelt plot was conveyed with incredible voiceover performances afforded by the CD-ROM format and Kris Zimmerman Salter’s direction, and its earnest attempt to say something meaningful was a shot across the bow for all those who said games were mere toys. That game completely changed the way I viewed games after I played it in 1998,” Ryan continues, “especially with its emphasis on nonlethal playthroughs. It opened my eyes to a world where violence in games wasn’t always the answer, broadening my view of what games could be.”
Truth be told, I didn’t play Metal Gear Solid at launch because I was so engrossed in Tenchu: Stealth Assassins! Ryan Payton
The critically acclaimed and commercially successful Metal Gear Solid series continued to be a flag bearer for the genre: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty developed the capabilities of enemy AI, having guards work as squads to check hiding places and flank the player and Metal Gear
Solid 3: Snake Eater introduced camouflage and a system that required you to treat your injuries, enhancing the sense of vulnerability that’s always been a key part of stealth’s appeal. “As you can see from prerelease trailers for MGS4, the team was always looking for ways to evolve the stealth genre such as allowing Snake to hide in drum barrels, having smell and the direction of the wind
be a gameplay factor, and granting Snake the color-shifting ‘Octocamo’ suit,” says Ryan.
The final stealth giant released in 1998 was Looking Glass Studios’ iconic first-person PC title, Thief: The Dark Project. A visibility meter allowed players to play with shadow as a form of concealment and sound was again an important factor to consider during missions. Perhaps the most important thing about the game, however, was that it represented an early attempt at
open-ended stealth, with the player given the freedom to search for different routes and approaches to achieve objectives, helping to address potential frustrations that some still feel with the genre.
“The stuff that really started to annoy me was crouching behind guards, pressing a button to do a takedown, just hoping they wouldn’t turn around – not for narrative reasons, because the mission would be in jeopardy, but because I’d have to redo a bit,” Dan explains on his frustration with some stealth games. “The genre feels ‘designed’, there’s a way around these five guards on their predetermined routes around the server room, and I started to find taking them out one by one really really boring. It’s clinical and perfect, and hand-designed and that feeling of “I am fighting against a designer, not these guards” really started to sap the joy out of it for me.”
Dan’s procedurally generated approach to level design in The Swindle allows him to move away from this ‘designed’ feel that he dislikes in stealth. “The Swindle’s approach of giving you the tools to really go about it in any way - blasting through ceilings or teleporting through walls shrouded in steam, kind of negated the need for hard design on the rooms themselves,” Dan says on the game’s design. “It’s not perfect- I over-relied on putting too many baddies in the rooms in later levels, so things got a bit messy – something that could have been more elegantly solved with different types of traps and what-have-you, but the focus was more that the game be a playground for your tools than as a puzzle to be solved.”
While we think there is still space for what we might call ‘puzzle-style stealth’, certainly there are a number of games that have used this more tool-based approach to stealth pioneered by Thief to great effect. 2012’s Dishonored and 2016’s Dishonored 2 are directly inspired by Thief, employing a sandboxlike approach to level design that encourages you to play with the game’s supernatural powers to produce a variety of intriguing and surprising solutions to stealth-based problems. This more open approach to stealth design has also influenced the Metal Gear Solid series. In a radical departure from its more linear predecessors, 2015’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain injects the series’ core system into an open world setting, allowing for emergent, systems-based stealth gameplay.
Before we move on from 1998, there is one less-touted title that deserves to be covered. Commando: Behind Enemy Lines brought stealth to the RTS genre, giving you control of a team
I had to think how to execute a plan, but sometimes failed by wrong input, clicking at a wrong pixel Jean-marc Haessig
of specialists and tasking you with completing objectives, ideally, without raising any alarms. The game inspired 2001 Desperadoes: Wanted Dead Or Alive and its linage can be seen in recent titles like Klei Entertainment’s Invisible, Inc.
“I played a demo on a print magazine CD of Commandos,” recalls Jean-marc Haessig, creative director on Desperados. “I loved [it] but also was sad it was set in WW2, a setting that was covered a lot at that time. I found [it] difficult to differentiate the heroes from each other as they had uniforms and the overall grey tone of the game was depressing. I suddenly thought of a setting with colourful heroes, both visually and character-wise, in sunny vivid environments, inspired by Blueberry by Jean Giraud and Italo-westerns. This sounded unique and refreshing, and a great opportunity to make an infiltration game that reflected times when I played cowboys in the woods.
“I think what frustrated me the most in Commandos was the fact I had to think how to execute a plan, but sometimes failed by wrong input, clicking at a wrong pixel. From this came the idea of implementing Quick Actions that allowed to plan executions of actions ahead and to trigger them when everything was in place,” reflects Jean-marc on how Spellbound tried to evolve Commandos’ stealth gameplay. “It allowed you to combine heroic actions, and even to mimic Cooper’s gunslinger quick-shots with ease. The difficult part was balance and the trap of overpowered actions. I think we didn’t manage to solve all the traps. Putting a snake on top of a ladder and attracting the enemies on that roof was an exploit we haven’t taken seriously enough!”
After the late-nineties explosion in popularity, it’s no surprise that a number of great stealth games followed in the Noughties, including the likes of 3D stealth platformer, Sly
Cooper And The Thievius Raccoonus in 2002, 2004 cult classic The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay and Rockstar’s disturbing and controversial 2003 snuff-themed Manhunt. There are two important series from this period that require attention. In 2000, Io Interactive released Hitman: Codename 47, which distinguished itself by allowing you to explore levels in plain sight while you formulated a plan of attack, providing you didn’t reveal yourself as hostile to enemy guards. To get into restricted areas, the game borrowed a trick from the early Wolfenstein games, allowing you to don disguises and search for creative ways to off your targets. The series has remixed and experimented with these core concepts over the course of its history, most successfully in 2006’s Hitman: Blood Money and the recent reboots, Hitman and Hitman 2, released in 2016 and 2018 respectively.
2002 saw the release of another long-running stealth series in Ubisoft’s Mgs-inspired Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. The game had a strong emphasis on light and dark, allowing you to shoot out lights. The game is also notable for Sam Fisher’s acrobatic abilities: you can climb ledges, hang from pipes and, coolest of all, use a split jump to hold yourself up in between narrow walls. The series high-point in generally considered to be 2005’s Chaos Theory, which smoothed out the rough edges of its predecessors.
There’s one huge stealth series left for us to cover and that is Assassin’s Creed, which kicked off in 2007 and is still going strong today with its most recent entry, 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. While the series has suffered at points in its history, however, we shouldn’t forget that the series hyper-mobile movement system was a thrilling revelation that gave its stealth a distinctive style, hence the high praise received by the greatly improved sequel, Assassin’s Creed 2 in 2009.
You can see the influence of Assassin’s Creed’s movement across all modern videogaming, including recent stealth titles such as 2014’s Styx Master Of The Shadows and 2017 follow-up Styx: Shards Of Darkness, though that title is not the game’s main influences. “The original Thief, for embodying a hero whose abilities allow him to stealthily evolve in a dangerous world,” says Cyanide’s Guillaume Blanchard, listing the game’s inspirations, “Dishonored, for its ‘opencorridor’ levels in which the player is both guided towards his objective but also has great freedom in how he can approach them; Hitman, for its freedom in the ways we can tackle the objectives; Mark Of The Ninja, for the great mix between pure stealth mechanisms and a very agile character.”
The player might be frustrated not being able to eliminate a single isolated guard Guillaume Blanchard
The Styx games provide a great example of the struggle many stealth titles have faced: what happens when the player gets spotted? “At first, we thought about prohibiting any confrontation between Styx and his enemies to make it clear that the solutions to solve situations were in the analysis of the environment and planning of actions, and not in direct combat,” Guillaume explains. “However, there were some situations where the player had made a lot of effort to eliminate many guards discreetly and found themselves face-to-face with a basic guard. Should it be a game over? We thought that in this situation, the player might be frustrated not being able to eliminate a single isolated guard and so we decided to add a front-ass-assination feature. Our idea was to respond to the one-on-one case but without letting the player believe that fighting is a solution in the other cases. The player must first counter his opponent’s attack to destabilise him and then have a window to kill him.”
The success of the stealth genre has meant that its influence has leaked even into games that we wouldn’t necessarily call stealth games. Think of the way RPGS like The Elder Scrolls allow you to build assassins, how Bioshock contains optional abilities that can add a stealth element to its FPS combat, or the way that the
Far Cry games include systems that allow you to make them into stealth experiences. Large parts of the Batman: Arkham games require combat, but there is also a strong stealth element. “The wealth of options for taking out each guard, and the ability to bat-rope up to the shadows from pretty much anywhere really solved a lot of the problems with the genre,” says Dan on Arkham Asylum’s stealth sections. Then there is the Deus Ex series and The Last Of Us. Technically speaking, stealth is just an option in these games, too. However, these feel like games that lean more towards stealth, whether because it fits with the worlds’ atmosphere, because there are so many
cool stealth options to play with or, in the case of the Deus Ex, because of a shooting system that lacks satisfaction, or, as in 2011’s Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the game features a hacking mechanic that lets you farm experience points.
Regardless, the point is that while we are still getting stealth games – we’d highlight Gunpoint’s blend of fast-paced sneaking and hacking, Mark Of The Ninja’s superb 2D acrobatic gameplay, Alien: Isolation’s horror-infused take on the genre, the recent Hitman games, MGSV and Dishonored 2
– the line between stealth and action games has blurred. Its appeal has been explored in a whole variety of compelling and unique ways – in 2D, in 3D, in action games and RTS games, with stealth superpowers in Dishonored, disguises in Wolfenstein and Hitman, in games like Alien: Isolation when vulnerability is the appeal and Batman: Arkham Asylum where the opposite is true, in games where you sneak carefully and slowly like Metal Gear Solid or where you fly across rooftops as in the Assassin’s Creed series. These successful and diverse explorations of what stealth can be have sent ripples across the entire videogames medium.