Solid Snake
The mullet-wearing, gravelly-voiced, cardboard-box-hiding stealth operative of Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid series — the character who made stealth a video-game genre.
Origin
First appeared in Metal Gear on the MSX in 1987. The breakthrough came with Metal Gear Solid (PlayStation, 1998), one of the first games to play like a film — extended cutscenes, voice acting, an actual writer (Hideo Kojima) with auteur ambitions. The series pioneered stealth gameplay (sneaking, not shooting), introduced the now-iconic '!' alert symbol when a guard spots you, and made hiding in a cardboard box a running gag. The plots are famously, willfully convoluted — a labyrinth of clones, nanomachines, and double-crosses spanning seven mainline games.
Modern usage
The exclamation-mark alert sound (a sharp '!') is universally recognized as 'you've been spotted' in gaming and beyond. 'Hiding in a cardboard box' is a standard joke about avoiding detection. Kojima as auteur is often referenced as the original director-as-rockstar in games — sometimes admiringly, sometimes mocking the cutscene-bloat that came with it.
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