Could Metal Gears Be Real?

April 1st, 2008 · 7 Comments

Dawgoo! DAWGOOOOOO!!!!!

When the first Metal Gear 4 trailers first started hitting the net, the Mini Gears (or whatever the walkers are called) garnered a ton of attention. The Gears polarized a lot of opinion, ranging from “holy jeebs is that cool” to “why do the cow-walkers moo??!?”

They were decidedly…different. Some people claimed that the moo-ing was lame and out of place; that it had an unnatural quality about it. After all, why would they moo? But there was something inherently natural about them. The legs were almost sexy; the hips swivelling in a female fashion. We found things about them that were immediately recognizeable. The feet had toes, heels, the legs even seemed to have calf muscles. They slipped, wobbled, and regained their balance. They ran, trotted, and charged.

These things, while amazing, seemed a bit far fetched, and firmly planted in the realm of science fiction, at least until this past week, when it appeared that Metal Gear could be a lot closer to reality than previously suspected. Enter the Boston Dynamics Big Dog project, which I’m sure most of you have seen by now:

This is eerily real, people. It blows Honda’s Asimo out of the water. Note how Big Dog slips on the ice around 1:25 and recovers almost exactly the same way two people hanging onto each other would. The legs move so naturally that someone’s spoof of it actually fools most people into thinking that it’s still the robot at first when in actuality it’s two people moving like the robot.

It even has its own odd sound effect: the chilling buzzing cadence of the gas powered motor. “Why does it sound like bees??” people ask when they first see it. Something 50 times its size sounding like a cow doesn’t seem all that far off, now, does it? The legs are even black (although Big Dog’s are wrapped in fabric), for crying out loud. If Big Dog isn’t the closest thing to a baby Metal Gear, I don’t know what is.

I suppose a good follow-up would be to compare and contrast how closely an artist/designer team and a team full of brainiac engineers came on a concept of a walking robot, especially when one is now a military contractor and the other makes games about future militaries.

But what I really want to know is: how deep does Hideo Kojima’s contacts go? It appears that the Mini Gears (or whatever the walkers are in the newest Metal Gear are; I doubt they are the Metal Gear) aren’t so much science fiction, but a very real possibility of what we could see in 20 years.

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Tags: design

7 responses so far ↓

1 Adam // Apr 2, 2008 at 9:29 am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motosada_Mori

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3mm2whuYLU4

Motosada Mori was born in Hiroshima, Japan in 1964 and is known as the military Advisor for the Metal Gear series. He is also part of the International Close Combat Instructors Association (ICCIA).
2 jerry // Apr 6, 2008 at 10:19 pm

metal gears are real.

they carry multiple nuclear warheads, super-secret, can be self-contained for months on end, are nearly invisible, and almost completely invulnerable to ground and air attacks

they’re called SUBMARINES.
3 ifthe21stcentury // Apr 7, 2008 at 3:59 am

I can’t find a link but I remember reading (I think in Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore) that the moo-ing is a ubiquitously terrifying noise in Japan. I think it comes from WWII, when the air raid sirens would sound, the cows would go crazy for hours, mooing in terror.

I, for one, love this kind of detail in Kojimas games.
4 Paji // Apr 7, 2008 at 7:23 pm

Just to clarify, the Metal Gears in MGS4 are called “Gekko,” the Japanese word for “moonlight.” I remember reading somewhere that the mooing is to intimidate the soldiers (for the same reason ifthe21stcentury cited), and the cicada noises are to lull soldiers into a false state of security.

All things aside, real Metal Gears? I can see it happening, but hopefully not to the caliber of REX or RAY, because nuclear weapons are a BAD thing.
5 Nikolas Payne // Apr 7, 2008 at 7:40 pm

And let’s not forget that the early MGS4 trailer(s) fixated on PMCs … months? years? Before they really came, scandalously, into RL media exposure.
6 Justin Force // Apr 8, 2008 at 12:57 pm

You could have mentioned that BigDog is funded by DARPA, just like Metal Gear Rex.
7 Mike Davies // Apr 8, 2008 at 5:29 pm

The first few seconds i saw it kinda walking making the strange beehive sound and I was like, “Meh, pretty clever…” Then that guy kicked it and it started slipping on the ice…

Just make it massive and it probably would make the cow noise, strap on a few nukes to be safe lol.