Metal Gear (mecha)

Metal Gears (Japanese: メタルギア, Hepburn: Metaru Gia) are the mecha in the Metal Gear series. In the series, a Metal Gear is a bipedal, nuclear weapons-equipped tank. The Metal Gears are typically autonomous nuclear launch platforms which the player must destroy to save the world and complete the game. Often, confronting the latest Metal Gear model is one of the final challenges of each game.

Concept and creation

Hideo Kojima said that the idea of the "Metal Gear" weapon, a nuclear-capable walking tank, was conceived in response to the nuclear war hysteria during the 1980s that resulted from the Cold War as the U.S. military had no mobile land-based nuclear weapons delivery system at the time.

However, in reality this was not the case as the U.S. had significant amounts of various mobile, land based nuclear delivery systems since at least the early 1950s. In fact the start of the 1980s alone saw the deployment of two separate mobile systems that would make up the bulk of America's land-based nuclear component in Europe: the Pershing II and the BGM-109G Ground Launched Cruise Missile.

In video games

The Metal Gear weapon has been consistently described as an all-terrain, nuclear-equipped, walking battle tank capable of launching a nuclear warhead from anywhere on the planet. In the original Metal Gear, the Outer Heaven fortified military state attempts to achieve military dominance over the West and East through the use of the TX-55 Metal Gear model built by Eastern scientist Dr. Drago Pettrovich Madnar after being forced against his will.