MSX
MSX2 could show eight sprites side by side before the ninth simply disappeared. Hideo Kojima has said that limit is why Metal Gear became a game about running, not fighting.
MSX was never one company's machine. In June 1983, ASCII's Nishi Kazuhiko and Microsoft published it as an open standard, and more than a dozen manufacturers — Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Toshiba, Canon, Yamaha — built computers to the same spec, the way VHS had done for video. It was designed to be shared, not owned.
That shared machine had a hard edge. MSX2 could move sprites, the small graphics its games were built from, but only eight of them could sit side by side before a ninth simply refused to appear. According to accounts of his 2009 GDC lifetime achievement talk, Hideo Kojima ran into that wall while building a war game for the machine: an enemy soldier and a bullet could not both be drawn on screen at once. Kojima has described what came next as an idea for a combat game without fighting — and then, because that alone would not sell, a combat game about escaping instead. The result, released in 1987, was Metal Gear.
MSX2+ and the turboR that followed it stayed almost entirely inside Japan. None of it made MSX a winner in the end; Nishi himself later suggested the format had been squeezed between IBM above it and Nintendo's Famicom below.
But the sprite that would not appear stayed in the world anyway.
MSX — at a glance
- Released
- Announced June 16, 1983; first machines shipped that October
- Makers
- Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Toshiba, Yamaha, Canon, Philips and a dozen more — all building to one shared standard
- Media
- Cartridge, cassette tape, and (from 1985) floppy disk
- Units sold
- Disputed — around 9 million by some counts, closer to 4 million by Nishi Kazuhiko's own
- Region
- MSX2+ (1988) and MSX turboR (1990) stayed in Japan
What actually happened
ASCII and Microsoft announced the MSX standard on June 16, 1983, with Nishi Kazuhiko leading the design; the first machines shipped that October. Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Toshiba, Hitachi, Canon, Yamaha, Pioneer, Philips, Mitsubishi, JVC, Casio, Samsung, GoldStar and others all built computers to the same open specification, rather than each competing with its own incompatible design.
MSX2 arrived in 1985, and it was on MSX2 hardware that Hideo Kojima released Metal Gear in July 1987. Konami's SCC chip, first heard in Gradius 2 that August, added five channels on top of MSX's standard three, giving certain Konami games music no other machine had.
MSX2+ (1988) and MSX turboR (1990) never left Japan; the turboR flagship, Panasonic's FS-A1GT, launched at 99,800 yen and sold poorly. How many MSX machines were sold in total is disputed — one figure puts the worldwide count near 9 million, while Nishi Kazuhiko has himself cited a total closer to 4 million.
The idea behind the machine
MSX was built to be spoken by many manufacturers rather than owned by one — a shared specification instead of a flagship. That same modesty produced its most famous side effect: a game built entirely around what the hardware refused to do, whose designer chose to redesign the mission rather than fight the machine.
Things worth knowing about the MSX
- MSX was never one company's machine — it was an open standard, published jointly by ASCII and Microsoft, and built by Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Toshiba, Yamaha and more than a dozen others.
- On MSX2, only eight sprites could sit side by side on a line; a ninth simply would not appear — the limit Hideo Kojima has said reshaped Metal Gear.
- Konami's SCC chip, built into its cartridges, added five channels on top of MSX's standard three. It debuted in Gradius 2 in August 1987, weeks after Metal Gear shipped.
- MSX2+ (1988) and MSX turboR (1990) never left Japan. The turboR flagship, Panasonic's FS-A1GT, launched at 99,800 yen and did not sell well.
- Nobody agrees how many MSX machines were sold: some counts reach 9 million worldwide, while Nishi Kazuhiko himself has put the real number closer to 4 million.
Where this leads
Thinking of buying one? What to check before you do →