When it was released, Master of Puppets provided many metal fans with an alternate image to the commercially popular glam metal bands such as Poison, Mötley Crüe, and Quiet Riot. The album sold over half a million copies at its time of release without any major video/radio airplay, making it the band's first record to be certified Gold by the RIAA. The album is often credited for innovating thrash metal, specially for the fact it included some rhythms which were written in a more progressive-like mode, and it also added acoustic features along with an ambient similar to power metal in at least some parts of the songs, all of these not credited to the thrash scene, thus being innovative. The album was influential to the later started post-thrash scene, mainly stylistically. The album has also frequently being tagged by critics as "one of the most influential heavy metal albums of all time".[9] The band's line-up during the album's recording was James Hetfield (vocals, guitar), Lars Ulrich (drums), Kirk Hammett (lead guitar), and the late Cliff Burton (bass). The album is remembered in part due to the death of Burton shortly after the release of the album in a bus accident while supporting the album on tour. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of its release, Metallica played the album in its entirety on their Escape from the Studio '06 tour, for the first time ever at the Rock am Ring festival on June 3rd, 2006. These concerts included the first-ever complete performances of the instrumental "Orion" (though the song's lengthy middle section had been performed at various times as part of instrumental medleys and bass solos since the early 1980s). The title track was ranked Number 51 in the "The Greatest Guitar Solos" from Guitar World. In 2006, the album was voted the fourth "greatest guitar album of all time" in Guitar World.[10] And the April 5 edition of Kerrang! was dedicated to it, providing readers with the cover album "Master of Puppets: Remastered". In March 2007, the guitar magazine Total Guitar ranked the 100 greatest riffs of all time. The main riff in "Master of Puppets" was ranked as number one of the top 100.
Several bands, including Mastodon, Machine Head and Trivium, recorded a tribute album for the twentieth anniversary of the album's release; the project was sponsored by Kerrang! and copies were distributed with the magazine.
