/ @metalgearsolid1032 The Metal Gear series is a collective term for the stealth game Metal Gear and the rest of the series[1], both of which are sold by Konami Digital Entertainment (KDE, formerly Konami). It is often referred to as one of Konami's representative works. The total number of copies shipped worldwide has exceeded 32.4 million. In 1986, Hideo Kojima joined Konami, and immediately after, he started working on the first game, Metal Gear, as a game planner (Kojima describes himself as a "director") at Konami, and it was released the following year in 1987. This game, which focuses on "hiding", is famous as the first game made in Japan in the genre that would later be called stealth games. A sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, was released in 1990. The third game, Metal Gear Solid, was released on September 3, 1998. It was called "the best scenario of the 20th century" by the US magazine Fortune, and became a popular work that sold 6 million copies worldwide. Since then, sequels to Metal Gear Solid and spin-off works with the name Metal Gear have been released, and it has become a series. Kojima continued to be involved in most of the series in some way, but left KDE in December 2015. In 2016, Metal Gear Survive, the first work in the series that Kojima was not involved in, was announced [2], and the series has continued even after Kojima left it. Kojima said in an interview that the major themes of the series after Metal Gear Solid are to convey "genetic manipulation" and "anti-war and anti-nuclear", and that he is aware of players' criticism that it "becomes preachy", and that he wants to incorporate "anti-war and anti-nuclear" messages as much as possible in the Metal Gear series [3]. In the case of "Metal Gear", it is "MG (METAL GEAR)", and in the case of "Metal Gear Solid", it is "MGS (METAL GEAR SOLID). In addition, the initials M, G, and S of MGS are sometimes taken to stand for "MEME (cultural gene)," "GENE (gene)," and "SCENE (era)," respectively, which symbolize the themes of the third to fifth games in the series (corresponding to MGS2, MGS, and MGS3, respectively). However, it is said that the initials of these terms combined to form "MGS" by chance, and that the combination was not intentional.[4] The abbreviation "Metal" is also used in the game's pre-release trailers and commercials.