With over 60 million copies sold across nine
mainline entries, six spinoffs, a few remakes, an arcade game -- and even a pachislot, Metal
Gear has solidified itself as a gaming staple. But for every game that saw release, there’s a
cancelled one that never saw the light of day. In this video we're gonna cover over
a dozen scrapped Metal Gear projects, like a sandbox Sorrow game, another starring The
Boss in World War 2, Metal Gear Solid Rising, Minna No Metal Gear-- kind of a PSP MMORPG,
a
lmost -- a TCG, and quite a few more. Some were just pitches and unfruitful Kojima
ideas, others entered full production, and the rest fall somewhere in between. We'll
start with the Sorrow game, the Boss in the Big One, and Rising, since we got some new info
and all three kinda bleed into each other. Back around 2008, when MGS4 was more or less
finished, there was a pitch within Konami for a prequel starring Snake Eater boss The Sorrow.
In 2023, long-time Metal Gear artist Takahiro Omori t
weeted out, quote: "About 15 years ago, I
submitted plans for [a game about] a young Sorrow sneaking through a sandbox, but then Murakoshi's
free-cutting Raiden [project] got the greenlight, and later [Kojima Productions'] Mineshi changed
a lot and it [eventually] became Platinum's." As you can see, Omori deleted the tweet pretty
quick, but we managed to screenshot it just before. In other words, there was a pitch within
Kojima Productions' for a Sorrow sandbox game, but they ended up going
with Metal Gear Solid:
Rising instead. Ultimately KojiPro didn't have the skill to make Rising themselves, so Platinum
Games took over and turned it into Revengeance. Hold that thought, we'll circle back to
Rising here in a minute. Around the same time as that Sorrow sandbox pitch, Kojima was
cooking up an idea of his own. It’d focus on all the Snake Eater bosses, aka "the Cobra
Unit," fighting in World War 2 at Normandy. For folks watching that aren’t super familiar
with WW2, if you've e
ver seen Saving Private Ryan -- that was Normandy. Most famous for the
Americans' D-Day beach offensive. According to Kojima: "Metal Gear Solid 4 wrapped up in 2008,
and the development team took post-project time off right after that. But of course, we were
in a situation where we had to start planning for MGS5. So I started coming up with several
ideas. I had several ideas for a game featuring The Boss and the Cobra Unit during the invasion
of Normandy. I then handed these plans over to t
he team so they could take over and make the
game. I presented my ideas to the team during the summer of 2008. However, simply dropping
MGS5 on the younger staff members was a bit heavy and there was resistance to doing it
without my involvement." The project was on Kojima's mind for quite a while actually.
Four years later at a PAX Q&A, he said: "I talked previously about a game featuring the
Boss as the main character… and this is something I'd really love to make. If I do make that game,
it won't be a spin-off -- I'd like to make it part of the main series." He brought it up again
to UK Games Magazine, and by 2014 he was even location scouting in Normandy. But unfortunately,
that game never got made, and his relationship fractured with Konami soon after, resulting in
him losing control of the Metal Gear franchise. Instead of the Sorrow and Cobra Unit games, after
MGS4, Kojima Productions went down a different route instead - an open-world slice-em-up starring
Raiden. They
called it Metal Gear Solid Rising, and it was gonna be the first title using the
brand new Fox Engine. Taking place between MGS2 and 4, Rising would've filled in some gaps
and explained how 2009's pretty boy turned into 2014's badass cyborg. That much was already
known, but we managed to track down some devs to get the inside scoop on more details. They weren't
authorized to divulge those details, so we've been asked to keep their identities anonymous. So let's
pull back the curtain. Metal
Gear Solid Rising was a three-act tale of revenge and rescue taking
place over two to three years. At the outset, Raiden's not a cyborg yet; he's fully human.
His mission is to rescue Olga's child, who's held captive by a wealthy American financier
named Wexler. Wexler's keeping her at Area 51, the US military facility. Raiden breaks her
free, but Wexler captures him, forces Raiden's partner Vespa to pull out his intestines, then
Wexler crushes Raiden's jaw with his bare hands, leaving his
tongue hanging down his chest.
Fade to black. More than a year later, Raiden has a new, black cybernetic body and
is being force-fed heavy memory suppressants. Now he's the barely-human "Black Raiden." This
was described to us as a dark part of the game, with Black Raiden now working for Wexler, and
the player constantly reminded that every person you kill is a good guy. Eventually you fight
a psychic Japanese guy who appears to Raiden as Solid Snake -- Snake's only appearance in
the enti
re game, by the way -- and afterwards Raiden gradually starts to recover his memory. He
manages to locate Vespa and together they break out of Wexler's compound. Raiden's black suit
gets damaged in the process, so Dr Petrrovich Madnar builds him a new one. It's a white suit,
'cause now he's fighting for the side of justice. Then White Raiden and Vespa set out for revenge
on Wexler. Regrettably, we couldn't get exact details of the ending, but you can probably piece
it together roughly if yo
u're familiar with Metal Gear lore. Rising would've been an essential part
of the series' main continuity that explained why Raiden changed so drastically between MGS2 and
4. To not only see, but experience how he got brutalized, why he's got the trauma about murder,
and how he ended up in his cyborg body. The setting was described as futuristic, much more
so than MGS4, despite taking place earlier in the timeline. Producer Shigenobu Matsuyama stated
publicly that there would definitely be
an online mode, and very likely some functionality
with Xbox Kinect and PlayStation Move. This was all happening pretty much at the
height of the motion- controls craze, back in the late 2000's, early 2010's. Unfortunately,
the game itself was an unplayable mess. Kojima Productions envisioned an open world where
Raiden can cut absolutely anything to pieces, running at 60 frames a second. A short gameplay
trailer to that effect was shown at E3 2010, but our inside sources tell us it was enti
rely
pre-rendered. In reality, the game ran at more like 10 frames a second, because -- simply put --
KojiPro didn't have the programming chops to turn their vision into reality. So the project was
handed off to Platinum Games, who transformed it into Metal Gear Rising Revengeance -- which
they made start-to-finish in just nine months, with a totally different story. Raiden's black
suit from Rising was repurposed for Revengeance, and little else. Ultimately, Platinum's spin-off
got solid r
eviews and was a commercial success, and Kojima was public about wanting to make
a sequel. "As far as Rising 2 is concerned, I really do have that in my mind, and I want to
make it," he said. "And if we do make it, it would definitely be with Platinum. I don't think anyone
else could do it. [...and] personally, I think if we're going to make a sequel to Rising, it should
feature Frank Jaeger as a main character versus zombies… nano machine-powered zombies. That’s what
I’m proposing to Plati
num and the producer of the project, but they seem to be ignoring me. I said
I’ll even write the story for it, but [they] said, ‘no that’s ok, that’s ok. Don’t worry about
it’." Kojima actually wanted the original Rising to star Jaeger -- the katana-wielding cyborg
ninja also known as Gray Fox -- but his team was passionate about using Raiden instead,
so he reluctantly let them have their way. Alright, let's wind back the clock a bit -- back
to the mid-90's. When Hideo Kojima was working on
Policenauts for Panasonic’s console,
the 3DO, he heard through the grapevine about a machine with specs that made real 3D
possible, and it was fast. As opposed to the sorta half-assed 3D you could dp on 3DO. This
revolutionary console would come to be known... as the Sony PlayStation. In the 148th episode
of Hidechan Radio -- which is a now-defunct Kojima Productions podcast hosted by the man
himself -- Kojima said he'd planned to develop a third Metal Gear for 3DO, but its processing
pow
er was weaker than the soon-to-be-released Playstation: [Kojima can be heard speaking
Japanese for 3 seconds about PS & 3DO]. To work within 3DO's limits, Kojima considered making
the environment 3D, but the characters only 2D. His lead artist, Yoji Shinkawa, expounded on
that in a 1997 issue of Konami Magazine, saying: "I think the image Kojima had for Snake was the
face of Christopher Walken with the flexibility and muscles of Jean-Claude Van Damme. Because
originally we were planning to
use digitized live-action characters on top of polygonal
environments." Metal Gear 3 never came out on 3DO… but a little piece of it still exists.
If you have the 3DO Policenauts Pilot Disc, by searching deep in the Japanese glossary,
you can see Yoji Shinkawa's artwork for a very early rendition of Foxhound, who of course
eventually found their way into Metal Gear Solid, almost four years later. Here's
a translation of the disc's text, which summarizes Foxhound's role in the first two
gam
es, and hints at what's to come in the future. There's also concept art of Meryl and Snake, where
he does look a little like Christopher Walken. After Metal Gear Solid launched on PlayStation and
blew everyone's minds, a portable re-imagining was announced for the Game.com. The Game.com was
a failed portable, so you'd be forgiven if you never heard of it. They were produced by Tiger
Electronics, the company probably most famous for making one-game handhelds like these in the
80's and 90's.
Fun fact, they actually made one for Snake's Revenge: Glorified calculator games,
honestly. But unlike those cheap stand-alones, the Game.com made use of actual cartridges, and
some big-name games actually came to the console, like Duke Nukem and Resident Evil. The Nintendo
Game Boy was running scared… well, not really. The Game.com never even managed to sell one million
units. As a result, the handheld was discontinued and some titles that'd already been announced
ended up getting cancelle
d - Sonic 3D Blast, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and of
course, Metal Gear Solid. Magazine coverage at the time described it as a port of the
PS1 game, but also emphasizing the rescue of hostages -- which would've been more in line with
the original Metal Gear from '87. Sounds like a mix of both games, essentially. It would've been
an interesting novelty in the series' history, but probably wouldn't've been much fun...
especially by modern standards. Our efforts to learn more from th
e uncredited devs were mostly
unfruitful -- they didn't wanna talk -- so it's unclear how far along in development the game
even was. Footage has never been made public, but seeing the Game.com port of Resident Evil
2'll give you a pretty good idea of what we missed out on: We could've had this but Metal
Gear. Truly, we live in the worst timeline. The early 2000's were a heyday for trading
card games. Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Dragonball, Lord of the Rings -- it
seemed like
every popular IP was getting in on the action. Even Metal Gear... almost. In the
Document of Metal Gear Solid 2 interactive disc, there's a section briefly revealing the cancelled
MGS TCG. Fans could battle and torture each other with Sons of Liberty characters like Raiden,
Pliskin, and Fortune, using weapons, traps, and command cards. We won't spend too much time
on this one -- 'cause it's a card game -- but we did have the cards translated if you wanna
pause to read, and get a better idea
how the game was played. Each card had its own range,
cost, abilities, and so on. Unfortunately, the rules weren't explained in-depth,
and the cards are apparently unfinished, with mostly copy-pasted text. That said, in
broad terms it does look similar to how the cards in Metal Gear Acid ended up functioning a
few years later, so it seems the overall concept got reworked to become an actual video game.
And thus, tragically, no Metal Gear booster packs with first-edition holographic Vamps
that're eventually worth more than your house. After Metal Gear Solid 4's launch, fans
were expecting an eventual deluxe edition, maybe a year or so down the road. Similar to how
Integral, Substance, and Subsistence added new content and features to the first three games.
But MGS4's upgrade never came, and it wasn't till a couple years later that Kojima explained
why. Talking on his Japanese Twitter account, he said he was just too busy. That he'd like to
see a complete edition with Trophy
support and 3D, but doing so would mean less time to craft a brand
new game. He hoped someone else could make it for him, but no one did. We talked to MGS4's assistant
producer Ryan Payton, who filled us in a little more on the behind-the-scenes considerations for
MGS4 Substance. Like an underground escort mission with Big Mama in Eastern Europe that was 65%
complete, and some stuff with the Rat Patrol in the Middle East. Some voiceover work was already
done. We covered all that in-depth in
our MGS Cut Content video a couple years back so we won't
rehash it all here, you can go back and watch that previous video if you wanna learn more. But as far
as why it never got made, Ryan did have this to add: [The experience of MGS4 was that, I feel like
Hideo was able to get a lot of ideas that most teams would've taken 7 years to build, at hundreds
of millions of dollars -- him and the team were able to get that in the game. And I suspect that
there was less on the cutting room floor
on MGS4 than there was in MGS3 that would justify like
a Subsistence version or a Substance version.’] As of the making of this video, Metal Gear Solid
4's still famously "stuck" on PlayStation 3. It can't run on PS4 or 5, or any other console for
that matter. But Konami actually made an Xbox 360 port, which if it'd been released, would
presumably be playable on modern Xbox consoles even today through backwards compatibility --
just like the 2011 HD Collection. So if it was finished, why d
idn't it get released? According
to Ryan Payton, Microsoft was desperate to get the game on their platform. He went on to say:
"One fateful day, the Konami R&D team hosted a meeting where we got to see the fruits of their
labor -- Metal Gear Solid 4 running beautifully and smoothly on an Xbox 360... It looked almost
identical to the PS3 version, but because the game was around 50 gigabytes in size, [which fit fine
on one PS3 Blu-Ray disc,] Konami would have had to ship the Xbox 360 version
as a half-dozen or
so DVDs. The internet would have laughed at us." Kojima was also opposed to the concept of ports
altogether, and explained that a game like MGS4 built specially for PS3 wouldn't be a good fit
on other consoles, and therefore releasing such a port would be disloyal to fans. After a while he
said he was, quote, "fed up" with people asking for it. But then they released that aforementioned
HD Collection on 360 soon after, and nowadays literally every Metal Gear is playable o
n Xbox
except MGS4, so take that for what you will. Another interesting port, from a historical
perspective, was an Amiga version of the original Metal Gear. For the younger folks watching --
the Amiga was a home computer released in '87, with 16-bit graphics considered ahead of its
time. For example, here's the Amiga playing Shadow of the Beast -- looks pretty advanced
compared to an NES game, doesn't it? Metal Gear was slated for the Amiga, and Konami even got as
far as advertising it...
but it never came out. Metal Gear's NES port was famously very different
compared to Kojima's original release on the MSX2 home computer. The NES version even went on to
get its own direct sequel, Snake's Revenge, which isn't part of the mainline series. The canned
Amiga port would've been handled by the same team who did the NES version -- a company called Banana
Development. Talking to UK Games Magazine in 2011, Banana employee Charles Ernst explained why
the NES version turned out the w
ay it did, and addressed the long-forgotten Amiga port as well.
You can pause and read, but long story short, when he was porting MSX to NES, he wasn't provided
a debug version to work from, and couldn't rip graphics directly from the ROM like he'd usually
do. So Ernst had to just kinda play it himself and videotape it, then do his best to replicate
everything within the NES's limitations. Took him seven months. As far as the Amiga port,
he said, quote: "There were plans to create an Amiga
version but it was shelved after most
publishers dropped the Amiga due to piracy. Our company was supposed to port the Amiga version and
we did the [box art] mockups to encourage Konami." Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that Amiga port's
locked in a vault somewhere, maybe to get leaked someday for curious fans to finally get to play.
According to Ernst, he's 99 percent certain it never got made. Those advertised Amiga screenshots
had different graphics than any port that did get released -
- but are likely just mock-ups. Speaking
of which, besides the NES and MSX versions, back in the day Metal Gear also got unique Commodore
64 and MS-DOS ports. So there's still plenty alternate versions of Zanzibar Land for mega-fans
to explore. The MS-DOS version even has cutscenes not found anywhere else... if you can call 'em
that. Charles Ernst did that port too, by the way. Moving on. Released in 2006, Metal Gear Solid:
Portables Ops was an interesting project, as it was almost two comp
letely different games
before it settled into its final form. One of them's simple to explain, the other is...
not so simple. We'll start with that one, the complicated one. It was born from Kojima's
ideas for a new IP, which he then grafted Metal Gear onto, resulting in an Animal Crossing Metal
Gear frankenstein. He called it Minna No Metal Gear -- or Everyone's Metal Gear, in English.
Kojima wrote about it on his blog in 2009, and it's difficult to summarize, so we'll just
quote him at l
ength. Translated into English, he wrote: "Everyone's Metal Gear... that was
the tentative title I wrote in the planning drafts [506] that preceded Metal Gear Solid:
Portable Ops… I wrote the draft based on the idea it was possible to create a full-fledged
action game for the PSP... With no time to spare, I decided to take elements I planned for
a separate original title and bring them to the PSP version of MGS. That was Everyone's
Metal Gear. [But] I'd like to expound a little on the origi
nal plan before it became Metal Gear.
Upon buying, turning on, and starting up the game, the world is empty except for the player.
As the player progresses through the story, they encounter many people and worlds to increase
the number of inhabitants in their own world, who they can become friends with. Any friend can be
used as a player. However, there are no continues. When you get a game over, a dead player cannot
be used again. Players increase their number of friends through various fo
rms of communication,
such as story mode, competitive and cooperative play, chance encounters, and AP soldiers ([that
is,] soldiers that used to be in Ops, who become friends when they connect to an access point). Put
simply, you start out alone in the world, and by taking your PSP on the go and communicating with
people and places in the real world, you increase your world's inhabitants… The more you play
and the more you interact with the real world, the more inhabitants you'll have in th
e game
world, which will eventually become your friends, [who serve as your] troops. And in order to create
troops, it's important to have a relationship with 'everyone' (people and regions) that live in the
real world. Rather than competing to get friends, the system's that if you get to know people,
they'll be registered in your PSP and appear in your world. For example, let's say Persons
A, B, C, and D all have their players fight to the death. Then there's winners and losers, but
if a
player dies, they don't come back. However, the other player characters that you came in
contact with there will become real in your PSP world, even if they don't become your friends.
In this way, the number of registered players in your world increases to 100, 500, or 1,000, and so
on. The more people and places you interact with, the more inhabitants you have in your world. There
are stories, events, and missions to turn those registered players into friends. There is also
competitive and
cooperative play. The project that brought this idea to MGS was 'Everyone's Metal
Gear.' I was busy with preparations for MGS4, so I entrusted this project to a producer and director
other than myself. After many twists and turns, it eventually morphed into Metal Gear Solid: Portable
Ops." End quote. You can see how some of those ideas did eventually make their way into Portable
Ops through its connectivity features, which paved the way for Mother Base in future installments.
Kojima's long
desire to create a game with no continues, and we'll touch on that soon in a
sister video to this one, exploring all Kojima's unrealized ideas for new IP and non-Metal Gear
projects. So subscribe if you don't wanna miss it. As for the other pre-Portable Ops concept -- the
simpler one -- we covered it a couple years ago, but it's arguably more on-topic now than it
was back then, so we'll briefly reiterate. According to Ryan Payton, another early version
of Portable Ops would've been a PSP g
ame that let you relive series' history through a
gauntlet of boss battles. The game would've run on the Subsistence engine, and focused on
local and online multiplayer. In other words, a portable co-op boss rush campaign covering
the full franchise timeline. Ryan told us: "Those initial ideas probably only survived for
a month or two, in terms of it being more boss focused. This is just my interpretation of what
was going on in those early days, which was: 'how do we create an authentic Me
tal Gear experience
for PlayStation Portable that satisfies fans, perhaps more than the Acid series up to that
point. And also how do get that game out the door fairly quickly. So [the idea] was to dust off
existing boss battles and add some co-op elements to it as well, but those ideas didn't last very
long because we quickly pivoted towards what ended up becoming Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops."
After that early premise fell by the wayside, Portable Ops was developed at a break-neck
spee
d with just 9 months development time. We'll cover this next one pretty quick, because
it was cancelled, but then it got uncancelled a couple years later. It’s still unreleased
though, as of this video's writing. And it's not a video game -- it's Metal Gear Solid: The Board
Game. And a pretty high-end board game at that, designed by a hot-shot in the industry, with
intricately crafted pieces, and initially priced at 125 bucks. That's an expensive board game. It
was originally announced in 2
018, and prototypes were made playable at conventions. But in 2021
the licensed deal fell apart. When the news broke, we got in touch with the game's designer, Emerson
Matsuuchi, to get an inside scoop on the story and how it would've played. You could maybe think
of Matsuuchi like the Kojima of board games -- he previously designed Specter Ops and its sequel
Broken Covenant, both of which focus on stealth, strategy, and got stellar reviews. So seeing him
make Metal Gear his next project wa
s intriguing. Its cancellation was even more intriguing -- that
made it a forbidden fruit we'd never get to taste. We kept in touch with Matsuuchi over two years
while the deal was in limbo, which delayed this video considerably. Recently headway was made,
and now the game's back on track. It's currently available for $100 preorders, scheduled to release
about a month after this video goes up. So good news, you're gonna get to play it -- bad news, we
lost our scoop. Oh well. Story-wise it's
basically a retelling of MGS1, and as far as gameplay...
well, it's stealth espionage action. It comes with VR Missions, a 109 page integrated graphic
novel, and seems a worthy experience for 1-to-4 Metal Gear fans who like board games. This is
starting to sound like an ad, isn't it? It ain't, I promise -- we spent a long time tracking this
story, so even though it's now uncancelled, we still felt compelled to talk about it.
Hopefully it doesn't get re-cancelled. And finally, the Metal Gea
rs Kojima wanted to get
remakes. Snake Eater's currently in development, but that's not actually one of the games he
wanted to see brought up to modern standards. A little while before Ground Zeroes came out, at
E3 a fan asked for remakes of Solid 1 and 2 in the Fox Engine -- the same engine that powers
MGS5. Kojima said 2 didn't need a remake... however... the first game could definitely use
one. But he hoped someone else could make it for him -- that there's a studio out there who could
put in the love and passion it deserves. Over the next couple years, Kojima started thinking that
maybe, actually he'd like to do it himself. At the next Gamescom he said: "[If I was] having some
of my staff members going back to remaking a game, I would go with Metal Gear Solid 1... of course,
I would not want to make a standard remake. Something similar to what Planet of the Apes is
doing, taking the best of the past and doing it in a very modern style and bringing something brand
new." T
hen at the next year's Taipei Game Show, quote: "I would like to play around
with Shadow Moses as an open world, so I think [MGS] 1 would be good, but no one's
interested in [making] it. We have the engine, the tools, and the people... it's
1 [that most deserves a remake.]" Regarding the first two Metal Gears -- the ones on
MSX -- Kojima said Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain brought the series' story full circle, but in the
process some contradictions slipped through and continuity broke in s
ome places. He said ideally
he'd like to remake both to fix their stories, and bring the games up to snuff -- but it'd
require a huge team, and at the moment he couldn't spare the manpower. Kojima's famous falling out
and eventual exit from Konami came soon after, so unfortunately, we'll probably never get
to see those broken connections reforged on modern consoles. Which probably applies to
all the games described in today's video. Did you also know Kojima wanted to
let players keep rats
as pets in MGS1, and the Snake Eater 3DS remake had 69
Extra Ops hidden in its internal data, a lot of which are finished and fully
playable? For a full hour of Metal Gear Solid cut content hosted by David Hayter
himself, click the video on-screen. Special thanks to our Japanese translator Jacob,
Arc_Hound for consultation, and especially BadHumans for writing and fact-checking. And
thank you for watching. See ya next time.
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