Metal gear solid 1 cover
In reality, Kojima likely had nothing to do with the box art. Knowing Kojima's love of movies, one might assume he specifically wanted Snake to resemble Kyle - especially since Kojima has said making "A Hideo Kojima Game" means he's involved in every step of that game's creation. Someone at Konami apparently took notice of Michael Biehn's Terminator character Kyle Reese, because, as Reddit user wokeaspie recently shared, Metal Gear's box art clearly traced an image of Kyle from the movie. Konami altered things slightly when creating the cover image of Solid Snake, removing the object from Kyle's mouth and adding gloves, but the face, gun, jacket, belt, and more small details are almost exactly the same as the Terminator still. Three years before Metal Gear's launch in Japan, James Cameron's legendary sci-fi film The Terminator released to commercial success, cementing itself as a classic. Related: Kojima Expected Mixed Reactions to Death Stranding - Here's Why It featured pixel-art graphics from an overhead perspective and popularized the stealth video game genre, complete with the signature exclamation points appearing over alerted enemies' heads that Metal Gear Solid fans know today. Metal Gear, the first game in what would become Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid series, was released in Japan for the MSX2 computer in 1987 and was later ported to the Famicom and NES.
In fact, Metal Gear's cover is a more than inspired: It's a complete copy of The Terminator, aping an image of Kyle Reese almost exactly. Early video game box art could be pretty hit-or-miss, but one way a publisher could avoid producing terrible retro game box art was to take inspiration from pre-existing work, just as the original Metal Gear game did with an image from The Terminator.