When MGS1 came out, I HATED it. It was an irrational hate born mostly of irrational fandom. I was a Nintendo kid. Sony was a shitty upstart that had no business in the gaming space. I hated their business model (CDs have such slow loading times! Only TWO controller ports!? Memory cards are a scam!!!) and I hated what they stood for. As an irrational and stupid child, I swore up and down I'd never patronize Sony.
Then an uncle randomly bought me a PS1 because his own son seemed to enjoy it a bunch. I very reluctantly played it but hated its guts through the entire generation. PS1 was home to quirky indie games and RPGs the likes of which the N64 had very few of. But MGS1 came out roughly the same time as Ocarina of Time, and that game was my holy grail. I knew very little about MGS1 because I was just not plugged into the PlayStation ecosystem in the same way others at the time (including my little brother) were. I thought the screencaps of the game looked ugly (they can't even give the main character a FACE!? Pfffft!) so I wrote it off. So imagine my dismay when I open up the GotY edition of that year's EGM and found my most trusted and illustrious gaming magazine awarded MGS1 top honors above Zelda. Were these guys stupid!? The fools! Now I had an axe to grind against this game.
I literally didn't give it an honest try (I played a demo once; hit the learning curve like willy coyote hitting a painted tunnel, and immediately noped out.) until *years* later as an adult, deep into the PS2's life span, not just after MGS2, but after MGS3 had come out. I thought well of MGS2 graphically, but that game never clicked with me. And MGS3 was a victim of the 04 Holiday Onslaught. I caught a roommate playing through MGS2 one day in the living room and just watched him just spank that game in ways I hadn't even imagined you could play it. Huh. So I struck up a conversation, and he began explaining what he was doing, some of the themes of the game, how to get over the initial steep learning curves of MGS games, and just the LIBERTY you had as a player in playing these games. Where each problem there's a billion different ways you could approach and solve them. Ok, my interest is more than piqued.
So I went back to my room, booted up the Metal Gear games I owned one-by-one, and just started beating them all. I mean ALL of them. 2, 3, Ghost Babel, Twin Snakes, and the OG. Metal Gear was a franchise I'd tried to love for a long time and just couldn't. I've done this with a lot of franchises over the years (Grand Theft Auto, Elder Scrolls, Metroid, Resident Evil, to name a few) but I kept being burned by them. But for some reason, at this point in my life, MGS finally clicked. It was like a revelation. Suddenly gameplay that seemed obtuse, alien, and confusing, all started to make sense. And it was honestly all over after that point. MGS2 and 3 were bigger, flashier, more beautiful games, and I ended up liking them more. But even looking back years after the fact with no nostalgia whatsoever, I was shocked by how well MGS1 had stood up as a game. And it didn't just "age well" it just straight up didn't really age. It was still providing experiences as interesting and enjoyable as anything 'modern' at that point. I was in love. This was my game. I recanted and lamented my previous ignorance, and never been so happy to be just flat out wrong. There's only really ever been a handful of times I've been surprised in this kind of way, where I thought I knew something but there was just so much there I was missing and wrong about. It was a very special and humbling experience for me as a gamer and as a person. And unlike most videogames which are designed to be disposable entertainment experiences, I genuinely felt like a better person for having played these games and having them broadened my horizons.