When I was a kid, my dad took me to a computer games trade show in London, where they had a stall giving away few-months-out-of-date American games magazines. At the time, we had a fairly typical '80s UK combo of ZX Spectrum and Sega Master System and I had only played NES on the demo units in shops. This was pre-Megadrive/Genesis too, so the US mags obviously had a heavy NES slant and barely any Master System coverage, so I found it fascinating to glimpse this "other dimension", read reviews of games I'd never even heard of, and learn how big a thing Nimtendo was in the States.
One of the magazines I picked up, which was focused on strategies, cheats, walkthroughs and the like, had a guide for Metal Gear and I can remember reading it over and over, amazed at how in-depth and "realistic" it all sounded, how different it seemed from anything I had played. I'd take the magazine into school to show my friends this game that seemed like James Bond meets Rambo, pointing out snippets of dialogue and little details that I'd spotted in the screenshots.
Many years later, in 1997, I was clicking through a CD-ROM of trailers and previews that came with Edge magazine and came across
the original MGS trailer. I was like "IT'S THAT GAME! BUT ALL MODERN AND 3D!!" and within about a month, on either my first or second payday from my first full-time job, I got myself a Playstation in anticipation of its release.
