Metal Slug celebrates 30-year anniversary with reboot tease

While it's amazing to live in modern times where video games are probably better than ever, despite what you hear coming out of my mouth, it's always great to look back at those titles that made all of this possible. Metal Slug, alongside other arcade and early gaming franchises, helped drive this industry forward, and it's now getting a reboot.

To celebrate its 30-year anniversary, SNK created a flashy new website dedicated to three decades of Metal Slug. And along that nostalgia lane sits an announcement: Metal Gear is being rebooted. Specifically, SNK said it's "reigniting and rebooting the series with a wide range of exciting projects," which are to include "new ventures in gaming." While a little vague, it seems SNK has reevaluated Metal Slug's position in the gaming industry, which could lead, if we read into that announcement a little, to new games in the series.

Retro gaming has made a strong resurgence over the last few years, what with so many beat-'em-ups and side-scrollers coming out lately. Of course, there's also the return of boomer shooters, which made it seem like the original Doom came out last week. In such an environment, there's more than enough place for a new Metal Slug title, which would bring us back to a time where we had to spend an ungodly amount of money to make the arcade machine let us have another crack at the stage boss.

Metal Slug wasn't on the ice entirely over the last few decades, since it got a new game, Metal Slug Tactics, back in 2023. However, no actual mainline entry came to the series since Metal Slug 7 in 2028, meaning. Outside of remasters and ports, Metal Slug hasn't received the attention it deserves at all, even though Steam numbers indicate hundreds of thousands of copies sold on each PC port.

Back when I was a kid, Metal Slug was one of my first exposures to gaming, though on console rather than arcade. My cousins and I would play the hell out of it on the PlayStation 2, going through each of the games innumerable times, trying to beat them without dying (which to us seemed entirely impossible). I recently played through the first three games with a friend, and that reminded me of just how cool the art style and visuals of the Metal Slug series are, not to mention the nostalgic audio and music.

But nothing is perfect in 2026, nor can we expect it to be. According to Polygon, some parts of the promotional materials on the 30th-anniversary website seem to be AI-generated, which is par for the course with SNK, which previously faced similar accusations. As Polygon writes, SNK is owned by a Saudi Arabian corporation, and that is enough to make us at least somewhat hesitant to welcome these new projects with arms open too wide.

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