Metal Gear Solid - Loading Bar

“I’m no artist, never was, never will be, I’m just an old fan hired to do some wet work.”

Metal Gear Solid on the original Playstation is one of the games that blew me away when it came out. Clever touches such as bosses that read your save game files and allowing players to fake death with ketchup bottles. With the 25th anniversary of the series in 2012 and Konami being a company Loading had never worked with, we put out a tweet and Konami UK got in touch. Hideo Kojima was visiting the UK to give a Bafta talk so we had the perfect deadline to create something appropriate and the whole history of MGS to be inspired by.

After some team sketching, we had the ridiculous idea to create a tribute along the lines of pixel art but with shot glasses instead of dots. After checking with our resident photographer that it could be done, we commissioned designer Joseph Payne to create a design template, 25 Shades of Snake. A shade for each year.

We used that template to slowly (very slowly, about 8 hours and 2100 shot glasses later) put together the image like a giant paint by numbers

The finished creation was then captured, printed and framed to be gifted to Hideo Kojima after his Bafta lecture. If anyone ever visits his office let us know if he kept his promise to mount the creation.

Ingredients

2100 Shot Glasses
Empty Warehouse
Buckets of Booze
Heroic Volunteers

Method

Avoid at all costs

The Game

Metal Gear is a series of action-adventure stealth video games created by Hideo Kojima and developed and published by Konami. The first game, Metal Gear, was released in 1987 for MSX home computers. The player often takes control of a special forces operative (usually Solid Snake or Big Boss), who is assigned the task of finding the titular superweapon “Metal Gear”, a bipedal walking tank with the ability to launch nuclear weapons.

Several sequels have been released, which have expanded the original game’s plot, adding characters opposing and supporting Snake, while there have also been a few prequels exploring the origins of Metal Gear and recurring characters. The third game in the series, Metal Gear Solid for the PlayStation, marked the beginning of a whole new line of 3D for Metal Gear. As of September 2019, over 55 million copies of games in the franchise have been sold worldwide.