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For all of the games – including its own sequels – that have come since, the opening moments of 1998’s Metal Gear Solid still loom large. After years of terrible pre-recorded ‘interactive movies’, here, at last, was a game that understood that having live actors on screen wasn’t the key ingredient in giving something a cinematic edge. Metal Gear Solid, if nothing else, understood how to create mood, even if the camera was panning around low-polygon character models. It aimed to feel like a movie, not look like one.
It focused on the small flourishes that mattered: moody music, precise camera angles. As players guided Snake around the frigid location, actor and staff credits played. And then, notably, just after the scripting credits: Translated by Jeremy Blaustein.
It must be a cool feeling, to see your name in one of gaming’s iconic scenes.
“It is,” Jeremy tells me from across an aggressively nondescript table, his hands nursing a bottle of tea that he would not recommend to anyone. “That was pretty sweet.”
His name has the honour of being one of those during this sequence that stands alone. All of the translation work for Metal Gear Solid was done by him, and to this day, despite the behemoth that the gaming industry had ballooned into, Jeremy still sees this as the ideal approach.
“I’ve found that it’s much better to just have one person handle the translation,” he says, quite matter-of-factly. “If one person is doing it, they’re able to… put their fingerprint on it, in the same way a writer or novelist might on their work.”
Next-Gen
Things have changed quite a bit from when Jeremy was younger; from when his New York Knicks baseball cap was the source of less emotional pain. It was 1993 when he first got started…
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