Some games you remember for their story. Metal Slug you remember for the explosions, and for the fact that every single frame of them was drawn by hand.
Released in arcades in 1996 on SNK's Neo Geo MVS, Metal Slug (subtitled Super Vehicle-001) was developed by Nazca Corporation, a small studio founded by former Irem developers. It became the start of one of the most loved run-and-gun series ever made.
👉 Play Metal Slug in your browser (free, no download or sign-up)
The Setup
You play as Marco Rossi or Tarma Roving of the Peregrine Falcon Squad. General Morden and his Rebel Army have launched a coup, and the military's newest weapon, the SV-001 "Metal Slug" tank, is caught up in the chaos. Your job is to fight through the Rebels, get the Slug back and take Morden down.
That is about all the story you need. The game spends its energy on six missions packed with jungles, ruined towns, snowy mountains and heavily fortified Rebel bases, each ending in a huge boss fight.
How It Plays
The controls are about as simple as arcade games get: move, shoot, jump and throw a grenade. Everything else comes from what you pick up and how you survive.
- Weapons: You start with a basic pistol, but rescued prisoners drop power-ups like the Heavy Machine Gun, Rocket Launcher, Flame Shot and Shotgun. Each has limited ammo, so you are constantly swapping.
- Knife attacks: Get close to an enemy and the fire button turns into a melee slash, which hits hard.
- Prisoners (POWs): Tied-up bearded prisoners are scattered through every mission. Free them for points and item drops.
- One-hit deaths: A single bullet kills you, so the game rewards learning enemy patterns and keeping on the move.
- Two-player co-op: A second player can join at any time, which turns the game into glorious chaos.
The Metal Slug Itself
The tank is the star of the show. When you find one, you can jump in and suddenly you have a vulcan cannon that aims independently of the direction you move, plus heavy cannon shells for anything big. It can take a few hits before it is destroyed, and getting out just before it blows up is a skill every regular learned the hard way.
Later games added planes, camels, mechs and more, but the original tank is still the most iconic vehicle in the series.
Why the Art Still Holds Up
The pixel art is what made Metal Slug famous, and it has aged far better than most 3D games from the same era.
Every soldier, explosion and bit of debris is hand-animated. Rebel soldiers chat, cook over campfires and panic when they spot you. Enemies scream and run, buildings crumble piece by piece, and bosses fall apart in stages. Add the famous voice shouting "Heavy Machine Gun!" when you grab a power-up, and it is easy to see why so many people still remember it.
It is also genuinely funny. The game takes its war setting about as seriously as a Saturday morning cartoon, and that tone carried through the whole series.
Tips for First-Timers
- Free every POW. The items they drop are your main source of better weapons.
- Use the knife. Up close it deals more damage than most guns.
- Keep moving. Most deaths come from stray bullets, not from bosses.
- Save grenades for bosses and for enemies behind cover.
- Bring a friend. Co-op makes the harder missions much more manageable, and twice as fun.
If you get hooked, the rest of the series is waiting: Metal Slug 2, X and 3 are widely considered the high point of the franchise.
Under the Hood (for the Devs Here)
Full disclosure: I built OnlineRetroGame, the site linked in this post. Since this is DEV, here is one thing that building it taught me about arcade games.
A console game is usually a single ROM file. A Neo Geo game like Metal Slug is not: it is a romset, several ROM chip dumps packed into one zip, and the arcade emulator (FinalBurn Neo, compiled to WebAssembly) expects to receive that zip exactly as-is.
My loader normally sniffs each file's magic bytes to detect its real format and unpacks archives in the browser before handing them to the emulator. Arcade romsets have to skip that step and be passed through untouched, otherwise the emulator cannot find the chips it is looking for. It is a small detail, but it caused a lot of "why won't this boot?" moments.
On phones and tablets, an on-screen gamepad turns taps into keyboard events, so the same emulator setup works on desktop and mobile.
Give It a Try
Whether you pumped coins into this cabinet in the '90s or you have never seen it before, Metal Slug is still one of the best 20-minute arcade experiences around.
Did you ever beat it on one credit? Tell me in the comments.
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