Metal Gear Solid: This Could've Been Your History

Welcome to Pixellated Culture. This week we'll be discussing the history around the Metal Gear Solid franchise.

Image taken from Gamespot. 

Now the Metal Gear Solid is a large franchise and each game is very long and in detail so we won't be getting into all the nitty-gritty. We're going to do a quick overview of some of the history the game is commenting, that is no way the end-all-be-all. I'm also going to but up the nice big Spoiler Warning here and now for the whole blog post.

We're going by game continuity chronology. Metal Gear Solid 3 takes place in 1964, invading a Soviet Jungle to rescue a scientist. There is a group making nuclear weapons. This sets up Naked Snake, Solid Snake's father, and the original Big Boss. The game also provides the beginning of the Patriots, which we'll discuss later. The important part of this is the date. Kojima choose 1964 on purpose, especially for a Soviet jungle with nuclear weapons. 1962 was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This sets the tone for the whole game, as the player can feel the people in the game are tenser because of the closeness of the two events. Of course, this is worse than the missile crisis, as this game includes two prototypes: Metal Gear and Shagohod. Both are nuclear tanks that could change warfare as it is known. Kojima is acknowledging real nuclear history, acknowledging how horrible that crisis was. He has added something to say how much worse it could have been, saying this crisis could have led to a worse history than the one we're in.

The first Metal Gear Solid was released in 1998, but the game's plot occurs in 2005. In the game universe, the START III treaty is being negotiated, thus why Solid Snake has to go stop the terrorists from using Metal Gear Rex to launch nukes via railgun. This is actually a comment on the actual historical START treaties, as the U.S. and Russia did sign START II in the early 1990s, but it was never ratified by the U.S. Negotiations for the real START III happened in 1997, but they fell apart. Kojima here may have been making a jab at the current politics by having START III occur later, but it sounded like the negotiations were going about as well as they did in real life. This is important for the rest of the franchise, as START treaties would limit the Metal Gears, as they are nuclear weapons.

The series continues looking toward the future with Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, released in 2004, but takes a different approach. The game is divided into a prologue, taking place in 2007, and the main plot, in 2009. The prologue focuses on Solid Snake, who is now working for an NGO he founded called Philanthropy. Philanthropy is an anti-Metal Gear group, as Metal Gears by this point have become the main nuclear weapon. However, the operation in the prologue goes wrong and Philanthropy is framed and now Solid Snake is believed dead. The game switches to Raiden's mission, with many, many plot twists which can all boil down to one idea: the government is evil! OK, I'm overreacting, but the game ends with the idea of government lying to soldiers or controlling their whole lives. Raiden's whole life has been set up by a group called the Patriots. The Patriots are a group above the government supposedly controlling everything. Conspiracy theories are nothing new, but the Patriots take it above and beyond your usual theory about the government. The Patriots controlling everything across all governments. This is most likely a stab at government corruption across the board, as both the U.S. and Japan have been accused of various levels of corruption in the 1990s and 2000s.

Metal Gear Solid 4, released in 2008, takes place in 2014. Hooray, humanity lived past 2012! Boo, the world in now caught in an endless war with nuclear weapons and nanomachines everywhere. Nanonmachines allow all the soldiers to do perfect maneuvers, fire the guns, and be awesome in general. Here we see what happens when nuclear weapons get out of hand, on top of world government being corrupt. This is Kojima giving us the bad future, what would happen if we let weapons and government get out of hand. Unlike Fallout 3, which is a pretty crappy world, but livable, there is nothing enjoyable about the world of MGS4. The two main colors in the game are gunmetal gray and brown. Fallout 3 had splotches of color here and there, such as in the oasis or Three Dog's outfit, but not in MGS4. Some of the first images we see are our hero being old despite the short time distance (due to FOXDIE, a genetic virus killing him), all the soldiers have nanomachines in them (soldiers on both sides have these) and are quickly taken out when the villain uses a signal to affect them, and the villain is trying to hijack the nanomachine system. Highly fantastical, yes, but also highly terrible.

However, there is hope in this series and his name is Johnny Sasaki. Johnny started off as a joke character in MGS1, where his only role is to get his clothes stolen and having a bowel problem because he didn't get a medical shot due to his fear of needles. However, this fear becomes useful in MGS4, where the nanomachines are injected. He skips out of the shots again and is therefore the only one capable of functioning when the villain messes with the nanomachines. What was a moronic soldier suddenly becomes the great hope for the heroes. Johnny gets his own moment of badassery with Meryl, to show that he is no longer a joke. Kojima's message here is about technology. We can't let technology do everything for us, especially if technology is dedicated to war. Johnny can become just as much a hero as Snake.

This is only a sampling of the possible messages of Metal Gear Solid series. The series is up for many, many interpretations, so feel free to come up with your own.