Sep 4th 1-2-3: The Old Man and the Snake - Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
Hello!
Today I will continue writing about the Metal Gear Solid franchise by moving onto one of the most personal of Kojima's releases, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
So what's the story behind Metal Gear Solid 4?
1: The Story Behind The Story ( 5 minute read )
After MGS3, Kojima had planned to finally move on from the franchise he bore into the world. He wanted to finally move on in life as a director, a writer, and a creative.
He had spent the last almost two entire decades building these characters, sharing his perspective on world events/philosophies, and telling these borderline prophetic stories.
Within Video Games, he had pushed the limits of what people thought they could be as a form of art, as well as what was thought to be possible with the technology.
He had brought the fans from the jungle base of Outer Heaven, through to the frigid laboratories of Shadow Moses, to the isolated sounds of seagulls and waves crashing against Big Shell; then back to another jungle, only this time it was the jungles that surrounded the soviet nuclear base Groznyj Grad.
Hideo showed the fans what games could really be, but it was at a cost.
The price of making MGS into what it was at this time was paid with Kojima’s blood, sweat, and tears.
It was paid with almost 20 years of his life, a number of ‘difficulties’ with his studios publisher, and an inability to delve deeper into the many other ideas he had as a creative.
So after MGS3 had been released, he let the players know that it was also his final entry in the Metal Gear franchise. It was almost instantly fought back by the diehard fans who wanted more.
Then when those same fans read about an illusive ‘MGS4’ that was to be directed by Shuyo Murata (Co-writer of ‘Snake Eater’, Director of ‘Zone of the Enders II’) within a 400 page book that was within the Japanese Premium Package of MGS3, it was like throwing fuel on an already lit fire.
The fans went crazy.
They wanted more MGS, they wanted the open ended question left back in MGS2 answered, they wanted Kojima’s MGS4.
And so it was.
Kojima was brought back into the role of Director for yet another Metal Gear Solid.
But this time it would be a bit different.
It wouldn’t be a story proving his innovative grit, nor would it be a story prophesying the effect media would have on society, it wouldn’t even be a triumphant culmination of his past projects either.
It would be a conclusion brought by careful, calculated, force.
A Solid Conclusion
Kojima had decided to pour all his development time building out the perfect conclusion to Solid Snake’s story.
Citing the fact that Solid Snake being a clone of Big Boss was, by Hideo’s own admission, a bit of a cheat in storytelling, he decided to delve deeper into the concept of nano-engineered genes to make up for that storytelling ‘cheat’.
He wrote about a Solid Snake who’s defective copycat genes led him to rapidly age in the five years since the ‘Big Shell Incident’.
This Snake would be a much more emotionally cynical and physically limited version of Solid Snake.
Dubbed ‘Old Snake’, he was now much more focused on the mission at hand, and was almost like the opposite side of the idyllic hero we knew Solid Snake to be.
Where Solid Snake was agile, noble, full of optimism, Old Snake was slow, bitter, and more hopeless.
Old Snake wasn’t allowed to move on from his days of espionage to live a normal life, much like how Hideo wasn’t allowed to move on from Metal Gear to create other works.
Old Snake was growing tired of all the secret societies seeking world dominion, weapons of either mass destruction or mass delusion, and fake ‘justice’ he had fought for so many times in the past; and so he, alongside Otacon, worked to put an end to all of this all in the name of justice.
Kojima on the other hand had grown tired of slaving away at the same ideas but with a new coat of paint.
So he always worked to make it interesting, whether it's through pushing interactivity through a cinematic story, pushing the available tech at the time to its limits, or revising old ideas with what he had learned over the years.
Kojima was growing older, and he was growing tired.
Now just as a quick aside, I don’t want to paint the picture that ‘Kojima didn’t love Metal Gear anymore’, because he really did. It’s just that he had spent the better part of his career at that time working on a franchise that he, in his own creative mind, had ‘concluded’ back in MGS2.
Yet here he was again.
With his plan to make MGS4 the indisputable conclusion to the series, he went around his office and asked every single employee within Kojima Productions what they wanted to see in ‘The Final Metal Gear Solid’; and what he got back was a lot.
Lots of loose ends he had left wide open since MGS2. Many of which he knew of, plenty of other he didn’t even think about at the time.
When Kojima created MGS2 his plan was to make a game that was left to the players interpretation in a lot of regards.
With MGS4 he wanted no loose ends, and alongside this endeavor he put a lot of himself within the game as well.
Arguably more than he ever had in the past games.
A Solid Cast
Being that MGS up until this point was known for its whacky cast of characters, and bosses, Kojima knew he had to throw it all at the player with the cast of characters for MGS4.
For the bosses, he concocted a group of mistress villains that went by the moniker of ‘Beauty and the Beast’.
These four individual monster-like women were each named in a similar fashion to the ‘FOX-Unit’ from MGS1, and thus they were: Laughing Octopus, Crying Wolf, Raging Raven, and Screaming Mantis.
Laughing Octopus had bionic appendages, much like Solidus Snake from MGS2, and would be in a constant fit of laughter as she slinked around her arena. She was made doubly difficult to triangulate by her use of the Octocamo.
Crying Wolf, being the fastest of her unit, would trot around the arena with the use of all four of her legs while she maintained a wailing cry at all times.
Raging Raven was always burning with a fiery anger as she flew around with the use of her bionic wings, and when her own brute strength wasn’t enough, she’d call upon her drone-like lackeys to assist her in her fights.
Finally Screaming Mantis was, well, always screaming.
However she also had those extra bionic arms that carried her trusty marionette dolls that gave her full control of the many soldiers on the battlefield. A curious fact about her marionettes being the fact that one was modeled after Psycho Mantic, and the other as The Sorrow.
Kojima planned for the main objective against this unit not to be killing them, but instead reveal their pure hearts and ‘rescue them from their misery’. This was somewhat inspired by the ‘Little Sister’ mechanic from Bioshock.
“There’s the old fairytale about the beauty and the beast, where the character gets enchanted in the forest and gets turned into a beast,” said Kojima. “These girls have been turned into a beast by the forest known as the war zone. It’s up to the player as to whether or not they can break the spells on the girls.”
For those who successfully freed these ladies from their ‘spells’ would be treated to fully modeled, live action actresses that he had 3D rendered into the game. A neat little fact, and detail for the tech that was being pushed forward at that time.
Aside from the bosses as well as the returning characters the player would meet Drebin, the magician turned weapons dealer, alongside his hairless monkey pet named Little Grey.
They would also meet the daughter of Olga from MGS2, Sunny. This 9-year old was a wizkid. A real genius. She was also designed to be a breath of fresh air for all the characters within the game, as well as the developers.
It was even jokingly talked about how this character was ‘vital’ to development in ‘lifting the spirits of the team because all of the characters were so old now’.
The last ‘new’ character was actually not so new.
It was ‘Big Mama’ AKA Eve, from MGS3. She was now 80 years old, still carrying her trademark Mauser C96 handgun as she did during operation Snake Eater, and was also a natural enemy of the patriots.
“She’s called Big Mama. Her name might suggest something, but I won’t comment anything further on it,” - Kojima
Kojima used these characters to explain, add weight to, and define the conclusive direction he was heading in with this title.
The bosses being similarly named to MGS1 bosses is almost like a book end for the entire story of Solid Snake, and the finale of his story running the player back to all the key characters of the entire franchise was a fitting way to go out.
It was almost like Kojima was very aware of how he wanted to close off the different loops within MGS as a whole.
He used this game to bring every defining aspect that made Metal Gear what it was, to its max. Then he used it as a canvas in which he could lay out all his concerns surrounding the war in the middle east, as well as the involvement of PMC’s (Private Military Corporations.
He turned the hero he created into a mirror for where he was at as a creative.
Much like how Snake’s youthful, optimistic, and determined nature mirrored Kojima back during MGS, so does Old Snake mirror him during MGS4’s development.
Where MGS in the past was like looking through a window into what war was like, MGS4 was like going through that window and being in war; and I truly think there must have been an aspect of that for Kojima looking through the window of time on where he might be if he didn’t move on from MGS, vs going through that window and living that life during the development of MGS4.
MGS4 is adored by some, hated by others, but to this day everyone who experienced that piece of art still carries that experience with them today. It’s a truly ‘sticky’ experience that ought to be studied more.
Almost 20 years from the release of MGS4, and I still hear people talking about this one.
It was truly Kojima’s most ambitious, and vulnerable title; and it most definitely stands strong against the brutal test of time.
Illustration by J.R.R. Tolkien
2: Creative Insights From Us
I. Many would say “why even work this hard on something if it’s going to take so much away from you”, and in most situations I would probably agree. However this case, or rather, this specific scenario Kojima found himself in was one that had to be done. It’s not every day you get to put so much of yourself into a piece of art in such a vulnerable way, and also have so many eyes on this art to be understood.
II. Now. Not later. Choose to begin your magnum opus today. Devote time everyday, and damnit, pour all you've got into it. You’ve got plenty to loose, sure, but I don’t believe there's a price you could put on what you’ll get out if it for yourself. Art is a way to express ourselves, and can also be a way to process parts of ourselves. However, this story of MGS4 and what it took out of Hideo is an example of something else. It was him coming to terms with where he was in life as a creative, and I see clearly how this was a turning point that impacted all his steps moving forward with his time on MGS5, and onward to Death Stranding.
3: Inspirational Quotes From Hideo Kojima
I. “Old Snake is tired, but he cannot rest because the world still needs him. That mirrors my own situation perfectly.”
II. “With MGS2 I deliberately left many things open to interpretation. MGS4 had to tie them down.”
III. “It was the heaviest Metal Gear I have ever made, because it carried the burden of two decades.”
Thank you so much for reading!