Oct 16th 1-2-3: Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker
Welcome and Greetings!
After a long enough break, much research, and a lot of watched video essays, it’s finally here!
The next entry on this little series I’ve been doing covering all of the works from Hideo Kojima.
So without further ado, What's the story behind Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker?
1: The Story Behind The Story ( 5 minute read )
Kojima’s history with the Metal Gear franchise is rather unorthodox in more ways than one.
For starters he had seemingly wanted to be done with the franchise since Metal Gear Solid 2, citing that in his eyes this was already the conclusive chapter in what he had planned for Metal Gear, and had desires to move on to a new IP.
He then went on to make almost four other mainline titles within the franchise, again, each time explaining how each one was the ‘last Metal Gear,’ only to somehow get dragged back into this world.
Sometimes it was due to a ‘vision’ he was granted, showing him how he could yet again push the boundaries of the medium in new and exciting ways.
Other times it was due to a mix of fan clambering, as well as a rather deliberate and seemingly nagging push from his publishers executives at Konami.
His love for the story, characters, and world he had been carefully crafting over the years with his team always brought him back to these concepts and philosophies; they brought him back to Snake.
The story was a similar one for what would become the next mainline MGS.
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker was conceived during the development of MGS Portable Ops, and its development occurred almost side by side with the development of MGS4.
Kojima had, as he typically did, laid down the groundwork for MGS: Peace Walker with plans to step back from the project and let the younger devs take over.
However, as typically would occur, this didn’t quite play out as intended.
“I originally didn’t plan to work on it,” he said. “But with the game taking place in Costa Rica during 1974, and the theme being nuclear deterrence, the younger developers were having trouble.” - Kojima ‘Talks Peace Walker’, with Gamespot
Kojima once again was on the frontlines of development, directing this title alongside MGS4.
To all the devs working in Kojima Productions at the time, this project was known as Metal Gear Solid 5: Peace Walker.
But to Konami, as well as some early testers, there was no way this ‘little game’ on the PSP could ever live up to be a ‘Mainline’ Metal Gear game; thus the numbered part of the title was forcefully dropped.
Even through dropping the number 5 from the title Kojima still pushed along with his signature direction and writing as though it was the next mainline Metal Gear.
True Nuclear Deterrence
The topic of nuclear deterrence has always been at the core of Metal Gear, along with the ideas surrounding how war has changed; and will continue to change.
With Peace Walker taking place during the Cold War Kojima decided to convey the realities of true nuclear deterrence, how the journey towards true nuclear deterrence effects nations, as well as how this journey effects relationships.
In the real world during the Cold War nuclear deterrence theory was heavily relying on the concept of mutually assured destruction.
The theory is the idea that, as Drew Credico at gamedevelopers.com puts it, ‘If country A fired on county B then country B would fire back and everyone would lose.’
It’s an interesting illustration, however it carries along with it some critical flaws.
The main flaw that Peace Walker is illustrating is the lack of calculating for the ‘human factor’.
The human factor says, “how do you know country B would actually retaliate?” It says “how do you know that the man with his ‘finger on the trigger’ would even want to go down in history as the man who ‘pulled the trigger’?”
And there is one real life account of this literally playing out.
In 1983 at the height of the Cold War there was a Soviet Lieutenant Colonel named, Stanislav Petrov.
Petrov was, to put it in a very simplified manner, in charge of monitoring all Soviet early warning systems.
He did his job as usual until one day the system flagged five incoming missiles from the U.S. to the USSR, and so he calmly thought it through, and against all training decided to not raise any further alarms.
He, knowing the current state of the times, didn’t believe this warning to be accurate, and thus he didn’t report these warning to his superiors; superiors who may have very well just sent the directive to fire back at the U.S.
Ultimately Stanislav Petrov was 100% correct in his assessment and is widely credited for saving the world from Nuclear War.
The Human Factor; it cannot be forgotten within these types of ‘theories’, nor can it be 100% completely relied on.
Now enter Kojima’s Peace Walker.
In the world and politics of the Metal Gear world, it is designed to remove this ‘human factor.’
It is designed to, with near perfect accuracy, properly detect an oncoming missile, use its bipedal movement to get out from the blast zone, and immediately fire back at the attacking country.
It is one of the first true Metal Gear, and it is designed to ensure mutual destruction, thus bringing a form of true nuclear deterrence, to ensure true peace.
A bipedal, a Peace Walker.
War Has Changed
War used to be fought for the sake of belief, emotion, and the livelihood of a people.
For the sake of this illustration, nevermind who is fighting who, or for what, just take a step back.
War is a deeply rooted aspect of humanity, and an idealist would say “what if the world could find true peace, a world bereft of pain, suffering, turmoil, and war?”
But the realities of this ‘true peace’, as they play out within the world Metal Gear are much more grim, and dare I say, scarily probable.
In the world of Metal Gear, war is initially fought out of human nature, but then it changes and becomes this thing that is fought for the sake of control, and at the end is ‘true peace’.
But this ‘true peace’, isn’t so much of a peaceful time where everyone is free, it’s more of an Orwellian dystopic ‘peace’ built from the control that the powers that be within the Metal Gear world had amassed.
From human guided espionage, to signal guided espionage and psy-ops, to a more physical form of control.
From Snake Eater spies, to MGS2’s arsenal gear, to MGS4’s genome soldiers.
You see it?
War was fought out of the fear that arises from difference, or more specifically the lack of effort being put into learning and understanding the difference.
You have war leading to an age of deterrence, an age where so much war is fought based out of this fear that arises from difference, and that leads to the masses wanting to do everything in their power to deter nations away from war.
But the only way to truly deter war, as shown in the world of Metal Gear, is to control.
Then in this effort to control for the sake of deterrence, a realization is made by the powerful and greedy; the realization that war is to the 21st century, what oil was for the 20th century.
Now I’m not going to jump up on a soap box and try to preach about what you should, or shouldn’t believe when it comes to these things, but what I will say is tread lightly in times like the ones we live in today; for things are not as they seem.
Or as Kojima has put it,
“The Cold War was a time where people, neither good nor evil, were manipulated by various factors, and they became good or evil.” - Kojima ‘Talks Peace Walker’, with Gamespot
Kojima has always shown how people are people, no matter where they come from, what they believe, how they eat, or anything of the sort. But he has also always shown how easily human nature can be tended to, guiding the heart towards many things.
For instance, I have always found Hideo’s approach to writing villains to be rather a thought provoking approach, that has always forced me to seek understanding difference more when it comes to writing characters for my own stories; as well as for simply interacting with the many people I come into contact with in real life.
Kojima has explained in the past how though there are ‘villain’ archetypal characters within the franchise, he never specifically approached writing a ‘villain’ in the traditional sense. More specifically, he always approached writing them as heroes for a different cause, a different people.
I think this approach is very profound on the large scale, and progressively more important when it comes to the small scale.
In real life, War used to be fought for the sake of belief, emotion, and the livelihood of a people; but the root of the hate, disgust, and urge for violence is founded on the fear that arises from difference, or more specifically the lack of effort being put into learning and understanding through the difference.
Metal Gear has always had these concepts at its core, and each game is but one aspect of these ideas being presented to the player; and later building a finely crafted tapestry exploring these philosophies.
Metal Gear shows how humans wage war, and how war changes due to humans pursuit of ‘true peace’ in lieu of war, and how war changes to suit this ‘true peace’ while waging a new war; a war against the human factor.
“War has changed. It’s no longer about nations, ideologies, or ethnicity. It’s an endless series of proxy battles fought by mercenaries and machines. War - and its consumption of life - has become a well-oiled machine. War has changed. ID-tagged soldiers carry ID-tagged weapons, use ID-tagged gear….. The age of deterrence has become the age of control… And he who controls the battlefield…controls history. War has changed. When the battlefield is under total control…War becomes routine” - Solid Snake (MGS4)
Peace Walker marks when war goes from the age of deterrence, to the age of control.
It also marks when Naked Snake fully embraces the teachings of his mentor The Boss, and how her sacrifice saved her nation from itself.
So he fully adopts the title of Big Boss, and begins his calling towards sacrificing everything to save the world from itself.
Where MGS4 was developed to show the final chapter of Solid Snakes life, Peace Walker was developed alongside it to illustrate the next crucial chapter in Naked Snakes checkered and classified past.
Painting himself as the ‘villain’ of the world, Big Boss’s legacy was meant to protect the very thing that makes humans, well, human; it was meant to protect emotion.
But as we all know, this isn’t all of Big Boss’s story, there was still one more chapter Kojima had in store; it was the story surrounding the Boss’s biggest secret.
2: Creative Insights From Us
I. Taking one real world concept like nuclear deterrence, and then doing a ton of research on it had become an incredibly volatile for Hideo Kojima’s creativity when writing most all of the Metal Gear games. Consider picking a real world concept that interests you, and research it ad nauseam. I can guarantee you’ll have an endless amount of ideas you can implement into your writing, storytelling, and general art.
II. Consider what pieces of art you are working on that could use a healthy dose of that ‘human factor’ in it. Think about in what ways you can spruce up and iterate on a piece of art you’ve made by making it even more ‘human’ and emotionally evocative.
3: Inspirational Quotes From Pierce Brown
I. “When I was in my 20s I thought the world was simple. Over the years I learned it's not. War has complexity, nuance and human factors.” (paraphrased mess of several Kojima interview lines on human complexity and war — source: retrospective interviews.)
II. “We did not only develop Peace Walker for the PSP because it was a popular console in Japan, but also because we had the concept of Transferring in mind … With simpler hardware, we were able to focus on doing things we had been wanting to try.”
III. “I always say, ‘This will be my last Metal Gear.’”
Thank you so much for reading!