Just saw this! Great work. I still need to start building mine.
Also Kojima made 2 original Metal Gear games for the MSX (a japanese only console). The second game was made as a response to the crappy "SNake's Revenge" game that you mentioned earlier. "Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake" is pretty amazing but was never released in the US. It was released on the recent HD MGS collection though. It's basically a 2d version of the Playstation Metal Gear Solid game in many ways. You should check out some of the gameplay on youtube. Pretty cool stuff.
The weirdest thing about the early games is that the Metal Gear robot doesn't appear in the NES version of the game. It is instead replaced with a big computer that must be destroyed instead. I think the NES didn't have enough memory for the large robot or something. Not sure.
