Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, joined by Matthew Castle. Matthew, we have another special guest joining us. So Rich, would you like to introduce yourself? Hello, my name is Rich Stanton. Yep, that’s right. Rich is formerly of Edge in Kataka, UK, and currently works on PC Gamer. So in this episode, we’re gonna talk about Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, which released on November 13th, 2001. Rich is a Metal Gear expert, knows more about it than me and Matthew, so it should be a good chat. This episode marks his 20th anniversary, and it’s great to finally have you on, Rich. I was wondering what it was like for you as someone who has had to listen to basically a year of podcasts talking about you, but not featuring you. Has that been a strange experience for you? Not that strange. It was, you know, I quite enjoyed it, because, you know, obviously, you don’t see people so much for the last couple of years. I initially started listening because I love to hear Matthew’s cheery voice. So it was just fun. And obviously, you know, we have a lot of crossover in our careers. So a lot of the stuff you talk about, I kind of know another side of it. So I actually really enjoy that aspect of it. It was, yeah, like my own little Easter egg. Every issue, every issue, geez. We should call them issues. That would have been pretentious. Rich, I was really curious, because occasionally you’ll tweet about the podcast, like outrageous things we said, you know, rankings that are incorrect. I was curious about which of our takes, which of the opinions you’ve heard on this podcast that you disagreed with the most, that you found the most outrageous. Oh, there’s quite a few things. I think, you know, Matthew generally has good taste. You’ve got pretty good taste. You’re much better at judging the mainstream, I have to say, you know, when it’s, I think all the console drafts, you’ve really kind of crowned him, so to speak. And I do think the N64 vote was a bit of a sympathy one, I have to say. You know, it’s, I think the one thing you said that, you know, made me react like a character in Ace Attorney that’s just been exposed was when you said about Pokemon, I’m not a fool and I refuse to be taken for one, which for me, Pokemon is, you know, I’ll be honest, it’s not like a series I play much now, but I think the first one came out when I was about 14 or 15 on Game Boy, loved that game, absolutely loved it. To the extent that the next Christmas or whatever occasion it was, I got Pokemon Yellow, which was exactly the same game except Pikachu followed you around in it. You know, it was then, yeah, the GBA games, the DS games, the 3DS games, I followed it all the way through that series. And yeah, I absolutely love it. I think it’s one of Nintendo’s kind of most magical things. So it’s quite surprising to me that you, the Nintendo liker, have so little time for it. Matthew, would you like to defend yourself? Not really. You know, Rich has written lots of very smart words about Pokemon, but I just don’t see that myself when I play them. Sadly, I just, it sounds terrible to say like they’re infantile. It sounds really judgmental, but that is, it is one of the very few of Nintendo’s, you know, widely quite child-friendly games that is just too child-friendly for me. I do think it got, like, there are entries in it that are really messy. Like I remember on the DS, they were, they were obviously desperately trying to think of a way to use the touch screen, you know. And of course, there’s no really useful way to use the touch screen in Pokemon apart from screen management, you know, your inventory and stuff. Rubbing a Psyduck? Oh, yeah. If only they’d let you do that, because what they came up with, I can’t remember if it’s the DS or the 3DS ones. They came up with Poffins. Do you remember those? Oh, yeah. You had to mix a little muffin for your Pokemon. And like, if you got it right, the Pokemon would be happy and, you know, do more damage or something. And that was awful. You know, it was like, that was just no fun at all. So there is this aspect to it where it’s like, because they got it so right first time, it’s kind of the same with Animal Crossing and even Smash Brothers, you know. Like, those games kind of arrive fully formed. And then the rest of their history is like, adding stuff and trying not to ruin the core. And I think Pokemon’s had a much harder time of that than a lot of them, because it’s like, it might seem like the solution is obvious, more Pokemon. But then like, I remember actually talking to you in the office, what would this have been? Which one introduced Rotom? Was that black, black and white? It would have been around then, Rotom was definitely big presence in NGamer for whatever reason. Yeah, I remember talking to you about Rotom. For listeners who don’t know what a random Pokemon is, Rotom is, what is he like? He’s an energy spirit, he’s just like a pair of eyes, but he basically just becomes appliances with eyes, which is just like such crap character design, you know? That’s the stuff that Rare used to do. And so one time he becomes like a fridge with eyes, and then like, what else is there? He becomes a lamp with eyes or something? So my grasp of Rotom is pretty messed up, because he hosted like the Pokemon section of the magazine, and the kind of running joke was every month he was a different appliance, and now I don’t know what appliances he was in the game, and like what bullshit we did in the magazine, so he was like a blender or a whisk. I think he was a fridge in the game. Yeah, what a joke. I mean, that’s kind of, you’re really scraping the barrel there. So, you know, I think there’s stuff to criticize with Pokemon, but when it gets it right, for me, it really gets it right. What about you, Sam? Are you a Pokemon? I’m sort of in between, I think. I think that, well, these days, I believe that Rotom would be like a, I don’t know, a fucking Smartfire or something like that, just a kind of like really out there appliance, like a Google Nest, something like that. A selfie stick. Yeah, exactly. I actually, I’m very big on the first two generations of Pokemon. Then I fall off of it a little bit. When I bought Diamond in 2007, I couldn’t quite get into it in the same way. I didn’t know if that was just because I didn’t have endless time to throw it anymore and the roster of Pokemon just was daunting to me. I’m not against covering Pokemon in an episode on this podcast next year, but that’s a big TBA. It has to be negotiated with Matthew Castle. But yeah, I’m a game freak. I’ll share your point of view, though, Rich, that it’s very sophisticated RPG for young people to pick up and play. I mean, it’s a good gateway game into the rest of the genre. It’s a good gateway game and there’s so much stuff you can get into, just in terms of building your team. You are right in saying it’s a simplistic RPG, but not when you get into the maths of it. I’ve never been that obsessive about Pokemon, but I’ve known people who have been and the lengths they will go to, to breed a particular type of Pokemon are extraordinary to me. The only time I got into Pokemon breeding, I sent Matt the article yesterday. In fact, I ended up just breeding loads of the original starter, three Pokemon and giving them away. I don’t know why, I just thought it was a really fun thing to do and I had a ditto, and you can breed any Pokemon with a ditto. So it’s like, on reflection, I did look back after a month where this poor ditto had just been like kept in a room, basically, with a rotating collection of Charmander’s and it’s like, oh my god, thank god it’s Squirtle next. I mean, sorry, this chat would not meet with Nintendo’s approval, would it? You would have completely knobbled Professor Oat’s whole operation by oversaturating the market. That goddamn ditto. Maybe we should raise the tone after that. Yeah, I think so. So Rich, tell us a bit about your relationship with Matthew. You were living together at some point, right? What’s your dynamic been like over the years? I think Matt joined Future just before me. This would have been my first spell, his first spell at Future. So around 2007, for me it was. I was on Edge. He was on NGamer. I just always loved Matt, a very funny guy, semi-bright. I just always got on with him. I always thought Matt had a good taste. Some people don’t have taste. I remember when he reviewed Heavy Rain and he bit his face off. I was like, yeah, fucking take that, David Cage. I can’t really remember how it came about, but Matt was in a place and had a room, so I moved in with him. We lived together for a year and a half. Which was a very funny time. I particularly remember that I was a terrible cook, but Matt was even worse. So I felt a kind of responsibility to sustain him in some way. Otherwise his dinner would just be like five cookies from Sainsbury’s. Which resulted in some classics, like the time I took out the potatoes too early to make mash. So we had something that Matt christened slops and hard. That would be artisan street food. I know, I know. I kind of missed my era. I would say my two big memories of that house are when Fable 2: came in and we had it on the debug machine and Matt could not get over making the characters crap themselves because you hold down the fart emote. Look, he’s laughing at it now, just thinking about it. You hold down the fart emote in that game and your character follows through basically and you can just do it over and over. And Fable being Fable, all the characters gather around because they’re expecting this giant magnificent fart and then you do the opposite and, well, it’s not the opposite. You do an unfortunate thing and they’re all like, oh, and I just remember how funny Matt found this. And then after- It was funny. It’s purely the excuse. No, that was the thing though. After about half an hour, I was like, yeah, this actually, this might be the game of all time. And I will say Fable 2: is one of only two games I ever got a thousand achievement points on because I don’t care about achievements at all in games. I never chase them, but there are two games I’ve got all the achievements on just from playing them. And it was that and the original Arkham Asylum. I suppose as well, Rich, what are your first specialist subject areas away from Metal Gear? Oh God, dead genres. So I particularly like or used to third-person brawlers. Real big fan of Platinum stuff. I think Platinum have kind of slightly gone off the boil recently, but there was a period in my life where I really like skill-based games. And I just like games that kind of amp up as you get better at them, if that makes sense. So Bayonetta would be the perfect example of this for me, where like you can play that through a normal and it’s an absolutely fantastic experience. Then you can play it through on hard again, and it somehow gets even better. And then if you go to, you know, insert Hideki Kamiya GIF here, Infinite Climax mode, it’s astonishing, you know, it kind of, I mean, it removes the game’s main feature, which is which time in Infinite Climax, no more slow down for you. I love that kind of game. I think they’re becoming like less popular in the mainstream space, just because they turn a lot of people off, which is a bit sad. Outside of FromSoft, of course, whose, you know, quality level is so high, generally, they can just kind of do what they want. Resident Evil, always huge for me, anything Nintendo. In terms of, oh, God, Grand Theft Auto, I mean, just kind of everything really. It’s like, I always, I had this period in my life where I had quite old PC hardware and ended up with me playing like a lot of classic titles and, you know, I wrote a history of video games as well. And that was really interesting because I went back and just played a lot of games I’d just read about before. And that is kind of like a, it’s really interesting to see stuff like, so for example, Adventure, which is a game for the Atari VCS. It’s kind of where Zelda comes from. It’s the first kind of top-down 2D RPG, but because it’s the first top-down 2D RPG, your character is a brick, you know, is literally a block that you move around. And it does have like, you know, representations of gates and stuff in it. But generally I’m just fascinated by games, which is particularly useful these days because I don’t have as much time to play them, but I remain kind of fascinated in the industry. And I guess I’ve given you quite a long answer. So I’ll summarize by saying, if you asked me my favorite game ever, it would be Bloodborne or Metal Gear Solid 5. If you asked me my favorite game when I was 16, it would have been GoldenEye, 007 or Mario 64. If you asked me 10 years later, it would have been Resident Evil 4. So who did you vote for in the N64 mini-draft, knowing that, Rich? Well, you know, I do have a kind of vestigial loyalty to Matthew. I think it kind of worked against you in this case, Sam, because to be honest, like in the previous ones, I voted for Matt thinking, well, Sam’s absolutely beasted him here. So I don’t feel guilty just kind of, you know, giving Matt the pity vote. Yeah, on the N64 draft, it’s like, you were nasty. I thought, I mean, taking gold, I can’t remember how you did it with the categories, but taking both gold, no, that was a joke. Matt, Judge Castle should have had you in a tank for that. I came up with the category, so it’s entirely my own fault. Yeah. It’s Matthew’s fault for making the categories cross over so much, like putting British game in there and shooter just meant that it was right there on the table. I agree it wasn’t ethical, but it makes a good podcast. You should have been in the tank with Michael Keane going, now you can’t have two rare games. Oh, what’s the impression yet? Jesus. Oh, yeah, man, that makes mine look good. Yours is pretty good, I think. Well, I think that’s generous, but you know, that’s fine. That’s not for me to decide. Yeah, the other thing I wanted to ask about, Rich, was the PS2 mini-draft. I thought it was really funny when you were in, like Matthew’s mentions, saying, oh, you just had to pick Red Faction. You were so close, man. You were so close. Is there anything about our draft selections you would have changed? I feel like Godhand would have featured if you were doing the draft. Oh, definitely. I mean, I was in the room when Shinji Mikami announced Vanquish somewhere in Tokyo. And before he announced Vanquish, he thanked the person from IGN for their Godhand review, infamously. Like, they gave it three out of 10 or four out of 10 and said the camera didn’t work, which is just like, it’s a ludicrous thing to say, you know? And I’m not here to, you know, dunk on the reviewer or anything. It’s just like, they got it wrong. And we all get things wrong. Godhand would definitely have been on there. I still have Matthew’s Japanese import copy, which he gave me on the condition he could hold it over me for the rest of my life, which he is continuing to do. We remember this differently, but anyway. Did I just steal it? I don’t think I did. It’s not like you were gonna play it. Yeah, Godhand would have been on there. I think it’s a genius game. Very, very funny. I think maybe a couple of his jokes in it might not be too popular these days. That aside, so inventive, such a different way of thinking about a 3D beat-em-up. And I think it’s much, much more a 3D brawler that looked at the 2D stuff, Final Fight, Streets of Rage, whatever is your fancy, and tried to build a 3D brawler that replicated a little bit of that. Yeah, so I would definitely have had that. But the PS2, I almost feel like that was the easiest draft for both of you. It’s like, yeah, okay, Silent Hill 2: is obviously, that’s always gonna be a biggie, just like MGS3. But there’s so, so much on that console. One of the great experiences of my life was my PS2 went in the cupboard for a few years. I just wasn’t playing many games for whatever reason. And I kind of got it back out again at the end of its life. And I was looking at the games and it was just like, here’s Okami, here’s Final Fantasy XII, here’s God of War 2:. You know, it was just such an embarrassment of riches for that console. Guitarum, man, it’s like, what did I think of your PS2 mini picks? I guess I thought you won, but I voted for Matt anyway. Is the answer. I’m hearing PS2 Redraft 2022 on the cards. Well, I’d be up for that. I’m always up for talking about the PS2 on this podcast. So that sounds good to me. What about the N64 one, Matthew? What willing to take me into the ring? No, that one’s locked away. There’s nothing else to be done. Oh, okay. I suppose, Rich, like, I do want to talk entirely about your career, just because I think that we’ll probably have you on again down the line to do some kind of episode similar to the Simon episode. And also I’m wary of this podcast running for four hours if we cover your very interesting career and also Metal Gear Solid 2:. So why don’t you tell us a bit about your interesting games and how you ended up becoming into Metal Gear, I suppose. Definitely the original Metal Gear Solid. So PlayStation was kind of, PlayStation was a big console for me. It was the first thing where my dad had gone against my wishes. So when I was a kid, my dad was kind of, he was vaguely interested in video games. Not that interested, but he’d get me whatever I want. And for Christmas, obviously. And I’d always been Nintendo stroke Sega, as everyone was in those days, different and different generations. And I wanted a Saturn. And my dad just said, no. He was just like, you’re not getting a Saturn. This thing is called the PlayStation. Sony are behind it, so it’s going to destroy Saturn. And it’s like, my dad knows nothing about the games industry. But he was a manager at Woolworths, actually. That was his job. So he did have some involvement in what was selling and all that stuff. But yeah, I got a PlayStation instead of a Saturn. And then I started to get games like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid. Kind of came out of nowhere. It wasn’t on my radar until I saw it in magazines, which I think would have been probably the official PlayStation magazine at the time. And Edge as well. I always read Edge. And I thought the name was stupid. I also thought it looked absolutely amazing. Just kind of the first game I’d seen that kind of topped Resident Evil, I thought. And, you know, just the themes of it appealed to me. You know, when you were reading about it, you know, because this was there was no footage of it. I mean, I’m sure there was somewhere, but, you know, I never saw this game in action until I put it in my PlayStation. So you’re just reading these descriptions of it like, you know, oh, when you’re in the snow, you’ll leave footprints and the guards will see the footprints and follow you. And you’re like, you know, you’re just sitting there as a kind of 16 year old or whatever I was, you know, with your brain kind of going, oh, how did they think of this? And then it absolutely blew me away. I’d never played, I played games like Wing Commander before that tried to do the cinematic thing. Wing Commander is a pretty decent game, I think. I’ve got a bit of time for that, but I’d never played anything that melded it so successfully with a kind of arcade-y style systems. You know, like that first Metal Gear Solid is, you know, it would become, as we’ll talk about, a much more simulation-led game, I think. It’s still kind of quite simple in terms of the still system then. But the production values, the voice acting, the music, the replayability of it, you know, because this was obviously a time that doesn’t really exist for people anymore because there’s so much out there in the way of free stuff. But you know, you got your two games for Christmas and you maybe got one for your birthday and that was it for the year. You know, Metal Gear Solid and the other games I mentioned, I think they became so beloved to me because I really tanned them. You know, it was, yeah, I must have finished that game, you know, 20, 30 times. Matthew, what about you and Metal Gear Solid? Like, what experience did you have with the first game on PlayStation? Yeah, so I didn’t play it on PlayStation. I only ever played the PC version whenever that came about. I can’t remember how long after PlayStation that was, but by the time I did play it, I’d seen, you know, I’d read so much about it and I felt like I’d lived most of the game like through Games Master. You know, I think I foolishly even read like tips guides that they published because that was like the closest I could get to it. And I figured, well, I don’t have a PlayStation. I’ll never get to it. So I kind of ruined a lot of it and the coolest stuff that it did. Yeah, yeah, played it on PC, but at which point maybe, you know, it wasn’t quite as exciting a thing. But, you know, definitely into its vibe, definitely into its world, the sort of melodrama of the thing. I think it took me a lot longer to kind of have any proper hook into the series, you know, in terms of being invested in its future because, you know, I just didn’t have a PlayStation. It felt like a foolish thing to be invested in emotionally as a Nintendo guy. So the hype for Metal Gear Solid 2: ended up being off the charts, Rich. What do you remember from that period where the game got revealed and they were first showing footage of it? Do you remember much about the hype cycle? Oh, yeah, I mean, it was definitely the most anticipated thing about PS2, pretty much that whole generation, I think. I guess there were others that had a lot of hype behind them, like Shenmue, for example. But the way this game looked, the first time it was shown, the trailer, once again, it was kind of Kojima Productions. Well, were they Kojima Productions at that point? I think they became it after Metal Gear 2:. That particular showcase at E3, it came on, again, I can’t remember the magazine. I know Dan mentioned this when he was on. I think it probably was PSM I got it from. I had it on a video. And that particular trailer was picked apart so many times. It was kind of similar to a lot of the coverage of Metal Gear Solid 1 in the sense that they were, again, talking about, oh, the soldiers are doing this now. You can see that they’re behaving in a different manner. I remember there was some military bit where they do a hand signal or something, and I’m sure some magazine got about four pages out of this. And it was just that kind of, it’s something I miss a lot from magazines, actually. And, you know, Matthew certainly spent a lot of time in the salt mines on this, but it’s like you’ve got two minutes of a game, say, and that’s all you’re going to have for six months, but it’s the game your readers are most excited about. So like that two minutes of footage is going to get absolutely stripped down to its bare bones. And I kind of love that. And it’s not a dying art because a lot of websites still do these kind of trailer breakdowns and stuff. But these days, it all feels very confected to me. It’s all like, oh, look at the Easter eggs Sony and Marvel have put in this new trailer. And it’s kind of like it’s been set up to be analyzed in that way. Yeah. Whereas with that trailer, yeah, there was just huge excitement about it. And I think it was also helped by the fact that like PlayStation 2:, I think it’s still the most successful console of all time. I think it’s probably going to be beaten by Switch eventually, or soon perhaps. I haven’t looked at Switch’s sales figures. But yeah, it didn’t have, it didn’t storm out of the gate. Like it had a pretty disappointing launch lineup, I would say. I remember, do you remember The Bouncer by Square Enix? Oh, it would have just been Square at the time. You know, and like there was there was a huge amount of hype for that game. And, you know, it was garbage. There was FantaVision, the fireworks simulator, which I believe you mentioned. So I think a lot of there were a lot of things leading into it. You know, everyone knew Metal Gear Solid was a fantastic game. Everyone knew that they were being given this kind of mega budget to go, you know, big on the second game. It looked, yeah, just stunning and easily the most anticipated game of the time. I can’t think of another game I’ve ever known with quite that level of hype outside of perhaps a Grand Theft Auto. You know, like in the run up to a Grand Theft Auto, you can’t hear about anything else in the games industry. You know, it’s just the biggest thing on the block. And that’s what Metal Gear 2: felt like. It was just omnipresent, particularly if you were into PlayStation. Yeah, for sure. It felt like it was on magazine covers and around magazines for about two years in the run up to launch. It was just omnipresent for sure. I got my first letter printed in Games Master in an issue with Metal Gear Solid 2: on the front. That’s not under my name, though. I wrote under a fake name just in case they hated my letter. Was the fake name Solid a snake, Matthew? No, I think you’ll find in a Games Master there is a letter from Basil Pesto. Minio Kojima presents a Basil Pesto letter. Matthew, what do you remember of the hype cycle for MGS2? Like I said, I wasn’t a big PlayStation guy. I didn’t own a PlayStation. We didn’t have one in the house. So it was forced on to me by everyone else’s excitement, particularly in Games Master. Obviously, it wasn’t covered much in NGC for obvious reasons. But I definitely remember seeing early footage. I don’t know if it was that very first footage, but when stuff started coming out, showing off gameplay features in the tanker, and I think it’s a part of the sort of publicity cycle Kojima is like very, very good at, is the bit where he just shows you just a shit ton of stuff that you can do in a game. And very, very quickly without much kind of sort of faff, he really hasn’t changed. He’s still, that is still how he presents his new games. You just get the demo where it’s like, here’s some ice melting, here’s me shooting a watermelon. And that stuff is the stuff that sticks and you want to play that game because you’re like, I know this is the game where the ice melts and you can shoot the watermelon. He’s very good at creating like highly desirable little moments like that. Yeah, it’s funny how much of it almost was like the entire tanker sequences designed as a kind of tech demo for the PS2 in terms of like, when you watch that first MGS2 trailer from E3 2000, it’s just bottles being smashed and, you know, rain effects and all this stuff, all this fancy stuff that that section would do. And then like the big crowd of soldiers stood watching the presentation as well, even that’s in there. So it does feel like that whole section is designed specifically to show off what the PS2 can do. So I was curious, Rich. So March 2001, Zone of the Enders was released worldwide with a demo for Metal Gear Solid 2:. I was wondering if you thought this was a good decision in retrospect and whether you picked it up at the time. The demo seemed to cast a long shadow on the game’s eventual release, but I was curious about what you made of this part of the game’s history. I didn’t actually, I was aware of it. I didn’t want to buy Zone of the Enders. And this was actually a period in my life where, and actually Metal Gear 2: would be one of the reasons I would return. I’d just gone to university and I kind of just wasn’t playing as many games. You know, it was like I had a different life. I was working quite hard. We had like a GameCube with the other guys I lived with, which we’d play Smash Brothers and other, we had some terrible multiplayer games. But that was about it. So Zone of the Enders was kind of out of the question. In terms of, I don’t think it harmed the game really, other than, you know, people reacting in a way they were always going to react. You know, because it was very much the whole, oh, you filled us, I thought this was going to be a game about Solid Snake because of that demo. And I think that reaction would have happened anyway. I think it was probably only positive and probably helped Zone of the Enders sell a few more copies. Did anyone play Zone of the Enders? Probably not, no. It’s funny because the second one was such a low seller, I think, worldwide and they never made a third one, which made me think that the second one only even existed because of the power of the demo to sell the first one. But it certainly had some nice Shinkawa mech designs in it. But yeah, that aside, it was kind of forgotten. A little industry trick, isn’t it? What did Microsoft do it with with Halo 3? Crackdown. Well, Crackdown is pretty good, to be fair, but still… Crackdown is still… It’s championed by the kind of people who know and have good taste. But it’s definitely not… I don’t think Crackdown would be on anyone’s radar if it wasn’t really for Halo 3. Well, certainly not for the two sequels. Well, it’s interesting as well because when they did the Zone of the Enders HD collection, I believe that the PS3 one came with a Metal Gear Rising Revengeance demo. So they repeated it years later, which was quite a nice bit of symmetry. God, I’m just imagining the kind of Zone of the Enders dev team going over to Codge Pro with a little begging bowl. Please, sir, can we have another demo? So it must suck as well that people buy it just for the demo, not for the complete game that you have made and worked really hard on. Yeah, it felt like it was one of the first games I saw properly discounted, Zone of the Enders as well. I remember it being about 20 quid in the game in 2001. It went down pretty quickly. Yeah, I think that was always going to spike the second-hand market for that one. So, Metal Gear Solid 2: then. It releases in 2002 in Europe. We’re doing this to mark the game’s American release anniversary. But the hype was just enormous in the run-up to that release. So when the game eventually releases, it’s broken down into two sections. A shorter tanker section at the start, which is about two hours long, maybe slightly longer. You can prolong it as much as you want, really, if you like experimenting with guard behavior and playing as Snake. And it’s followed by the plant sequence on the Big Shell, set several years later after the events of the tanker sequence. So in the first sequence, you play as Solid Snake, the hero of the first Metal Gear Solid. In the second sequence, the much longer sequence, you play as Raiden, a new character. This is obviously the subject of a lot of conversation, a lot of discussion. We’ll come to the Raiden part a little bit later. But I was curious, having played it today, I thought I was still really impressed by Metal Gear Solid 2’s stealth. And it really represented a sort of big leap on, a big leap on from Metal Gear Solid in terms of how guards would behave, first-person aiming, the overall sophistication of the sort of simulation, hiding bodies, the alert system was revamped, so it was Guards for Search for you. I thought it was truly next-gen for the moment. Rich, I was curious to know what you made of it as a stealth game at the time. What were your first impressions of picking this up and playing it? I thought it was absolutely incredible. The thing that particularly struck me when I was first playing it was how wet it felt and the way the guards moved, probably the way the guards moved more than anything else. I got quite into the rain effects in it. I would just sit out there, because I don’t know if you know this, but if you look up in first person, they’ll spatter you more. They can get more intense, less intense. You can obviously get a cold if you stay out in it too long, which happened to me when I replayed it recently. I was messing about outside in the rain thinking, oh, that’s funny, I used to do this 20 years ago. And then I went inside, a guard was walking by, and I just thought, no problem, I’ll just Solid Snake it, crouch down in the corner. And as he’s walking by, Snake just sneezes. And of course, the guy turns around, and I was, you know, I’m sure that’s happened to me before, but I’d completely forgotten, you know, it could happen, which is one of the kind of magic things about these games. There’s so much in them that you can’t possibly hold it all in your mind at once. But just returning to the guards, the way the guards moved, in Metal Gear 1, the enemy behavior is pretty simple. You know, they have their set patrol routes. If they see you, they’ll run at you shooting en masse, and they can notice certain things you’ve done. But that’s about it. I really think it kind of feels quite arcade-y to play now in Metal Gear Solid. With this one, their patrol routes aren’t… Some of them have very set patrol routes, but there’s lots of other guards around the environments. The way they moved together… So there’s a brilliant detail in when Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance came out. There was a making of documentary in it, and they were talking about how their military advisor for the game basically just drilled the developers in, okay, if you’re with four other guys and you’re going to go down a staircase with your rifles, this is how you do it. Basically, one person waits at the top of the stairs, covering everything below. The three go down with their rifles in a certain position, and the third one, i.e. kind of the last to go, taps the guy who’s at the top of the stairs, so he knows there’s no one else behind him. He turns around, checks, and then follows them down the stairs. And if you play Metal Gear 2:, this is exactly how the soldiers come down the stairs. It’s authentic because that is what happens. And I’d never seen anything like this in a game before. Obviously, I didn’t know that detail at the time I played it. I just knew that there was something very… I don’t want to say human because that’s kind of overselling it. But the way they’d made them behave made them a genuinely kind of scary opponent, I think. When they go into… You mentioned the way they changed the alert system. So when they’ve seen you, but you’ve escaped, but they’re still looking for you, they go into what’s called Clearing Mode, which is new to the series. And yeah, they clear rooms. So you’re hiding in this locker. And then brilliantly, it gives you a little picture in picture view. And you can see them come into the room. And they’re all covering their corners. This guy’s going to check this. This guy might come over to your locker. And it’s absolutely pant wetting. So yeah, the big first impression for me was the enemy behavior. I’d never played anything like this. So Rich, today I played through the entire Tanker sequence again. I came out with the feeling that it was almost a kind of perfect slice of Metal Gear in terms of how it escalates. So you start out in the rain, like you say, the enemies are quite spread apart. So it’s easy for you to start to learn how they behave, how there’s like elevation, how if they’re high above you, they can’t see you until you’re closer and all that sort of stuff. Unless you kind of like learn the systems bit by bit. Then slowly you kind of get into like, you know, an area that’s got two enemies in the same room and you work out a deal with that. Then you go into a place that’s got two enemies and a camera. And then you go into like the Olga boss fight, which I only realized playing it again today, that the Olga boss fight is quite a strange fight. She’s on like an elevated surface. And it’s probably just there to teach you how first-person aiming works, because, you know, that’s new to this. First-person aiming is new to this series. You could look in first-person and the metal gets solid, but you can actually aim using that. But I was curious about what you made of that sequence, because I love that it ended with the loads and loads of soldiers in the, watching the speech and it counting down, because that felt like a kind of elevated stealth challenge to go out with in that sequence. It’s not that challenging, but it’s a really interesting kind of like finale in terms of it being a sort of, you know, a big sort of stealth challenge in theory. So I was curious about what you made of that as a self-contained sequence, the tanker. Yeah, I mean, you could almost look at the tanker and say, that’s the kind of reason the whole game got made, you know, because it is very much what people in the industry now would call a vertical slice. You know, it kind of perfectly shows off everything the game is about. Works completely as a self-contained kind of prequel. Escalates, like you say, to, I think you’re completely right about the Olga boss fight. Yeah, that’s training you. Because I’m not sure if you can hit her if you just try to aim in third person, but, you know, I’ve just never have because it seemed so obvious you were supposed to approach someone, sticking their head out from behind pallets or whatever it is. You were supposed to address them in the first person view. I love the Ray sequence. I absolutely love it. So, you’ve played this, right, Matt? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, good. I was just making sure I wasn’t talking to a noob there. So… So, you have to take photos of Ray as you both know. There are all these trips in the room, but what I love about it is that it gives you a… I think Otacon is like, I’ve hacked his speech. It’s eight minutes long. So, great Otacon impression there. So, you get the eight minutes timer. So, you’re crawling around on the floor. You have to get four shots of Ray. You have to get it from each side. You have to get it from the front, and you have to get the Marine Corps logo on it, so they can’t deny their responsibility. And as you’re moving around, you’re like, okay, you know, they’re looking at the speech man. I’m completely fine. Every so often, he goes, well, you must be tired listening to all this talking. Let’s do some exercises. And then he’ll be like, left. And they all look to the left. Right. They all look to the right. And so all of a sudden, this, what you thought was quite a static challenge and one that has quite a bit of time pressure to it, you get these weird kind of like 45 second breaks where what’s happening is comic. Like it is funny, or I’ve always found it funny at least, but you’re just like, oh, thank God, I’ve got another 40 seconds to get that Marine Corps logo. I just need to make sure that this guy doesn’t see me when he’s stretching. So I think it’s got like Kojima at his best is able to combine these kind of like quite serious, quite weighty challenges where you’re like, I’m doing something really important here. And, you know, there’s, you know, a really high quality kind of stealth element to it. He’s mixing it up as well, giving you things you don’t expect, surprising you at the same time. And it’s funny. Like to me, that’s, I think there’s a lot in Metal Gear 2: where it would be as good as the series ever got. And that particular Ray sequence, I absolutely adore it. And, you know, Ray is probably my favorite Metal Gear as well. So the fact that the sequence ends with that amazing kind of Evangelion like dive into the ocean, that’s one of my favorite moments in gaming ever. The first time I saw that thing, my jaw hit the floor. Did it upset you when Metal Gear REX fucked up Ray in Metal Gear Solid 4, Rich? Was that a tough moment for you? You know, it’s hard because, you know, REX is my boy too. And, you know, obviously you want to be on Solid’s side. So, yeah, I loved that fight in Metal Gear 4. I thought that was one of the best bits of probably my least favorite game in the series, to be honest. Because Kojima does have this capacity to like take the wheels off. You know, these games are quite serious simulations. And then at a certain point, and, you know, Metal Gear Solid 2: is a classic example of this. He basically turns around and says, screw it, let’s have some fun. You want to chop people up with a ninja sword? You want to blow up 40 Metal Gears with a rocket launcher? Let’s go. And, yeah, I think whenever the series does that, usually it comes off pretty well. And I think the REX-Ray fight is one of the best examples of that. One of the interesting things, I don’t know if we’ll get to it later, or maybe you can offer more context for what it is, but you linked to the design document for Metal Gear Solid 2:, which is like a translated, I don’t know how they got their hands on it. It’s basically like a 35-page Kojima’s original plan for the game and how he pitched it to Konami, I guess. I was flicking through that today and what I thought was absolutely amazing was how many of the ideas, was how true the final game is to the plan in all the key ways, but also how his thinking in that document is really clearly split between mechanical evolution, the AI of the guards and the systems-driven stuff, but also already at the planning stage a really clear idea of the scripted set pieces that he wanted you to go through in terms of this fight or this kind of room with these kind of numbers in. Sometimes it’s justified. I think they talk about the room with all the Marines in because to show off the power of PS2 you want a room with loads of people in it, and that’s important. But it really does show him to have that kind of mechanical eye, but also the kind of choreographed set piece eye, where you sometimes think is one of these… I think in my head Kojima is more of the choreographed set piece man these days. But actually the balance is pretty great in that document. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the thing about Metal Gear Solid 2: and one of the reasons we’re still talking about it is that the video game industry locks games into a pattern. And it is one of the themes of Metal Gear 2:. You know, once Assassin’s Creed was a success, I mean, obviously Assassin’s Creed 2: was much, much better. But, you know, from then on, Ubisoft have just iterated on the same game. You know, I’m not saying those games are literally all the same, but they are very much kind of the same dish. And I think that’s something like Kojima has always been very, very conscious of, and like he’s not wanted to do. He’s never wanted to make the sequel, you know, that, you know, like if the whole game was Solid Snake on this tanker for 15 hours or whatever, you know, it would have been a typical video game industry sequel. And it’s kind of, it’s a bit weird. It’s like, it almost happens in this era where budgets were getting high. I mean, certainly to the extent he could afford to hire Harry Gregson-Williams, but it still wasn’t that high that like taking risks was out of the question. And it’s one of the reasons I, you know, I love the Metal Gear series so much is like, you know, you just don’t get other big budget directors taking aim at Guantanamo Bay or like the invasion of Afghanistan or as in, you know, if you reference the design document for Metal Gear Solid 2:, this is how, I mean, Kojima has his faults, okay? He can be a terrible scriptwriter sometimes, but his themes are really, really prescient, you know, and he was writing the design document for Metal Gear Solid 2: kind of in the months after Metal Gear Solid had become such an enormous success, you know, because it was clear a sequel was going to happen. And he picks up, you know, on the theme of terrorism, but the conclusion he draws from it is that, you know, terrorism is kind of like an unfortunate fact of the modern world, but the real problem is that governments will use terrorism as an excuse to control you, which, like, I mean, this is kind of before September the 11th by several years, and it’s kind of like, yeah, it’s almost like you could see the future in some respects. I, you know, I do think Kojima’s kind of got lucky in some respects, like particularly, you know, Death Stranding coming out, and then us all going into lockdown. You’re just like, God, does this guy have direct line? But, yeah, he not only thinks about the big themes of our age, but he kind of almost thinks outside of them, and he seems to have these kind of like quite, I don’t know if you want to call them like naive or pure, but kind of principles like human life should not be controlled. Governments are to be suspected. The military should never be trusted. No war is a good war. And it’s really interesting to me how these ideas come out in different ways across the different games. But the prescience of that design document, obviously, was that he was looking at the internet in the late 90s, you know, when every website was kind of built on GeoCities. Everyone was still chatting on IRC. I think Jeff Bezos was probably still in his garage. And he instantly saw that the problem with the internet was that it really was the information age. It’s just that there’s going to be too much information for anyone to meaningfully parse. And then what is, you know, what is ultimately the value of that, you know, and, you know, we can talk about this later, but some of the conclusions he draws 20 years later, you read them and you’re just like, yeah, that’s the age we’re living in. Absolutely. Yeah, we’ll definitely come, we’ll circle back to the themes a bit later. But for now, let’s focus on the game itself. So Rich, once you pass the tanker sequence, you get to the plant and Raiden is introduced. I know you have some strong thoughts on Raiden, but I was curious about what your take is on the plant sequence generally and the kind of like role of player expectation in the whole kind of narrative of how Raiden is received. What did you kind of make of that at the time? You mean by the plant experience, like the whole thing? Like the whole second half of the game? Well, I suppose like that versus the first part of the game as a kind of starting point really, I suppose like what your kind of overall thoughts are of that part of the game versus the tanker. I remember being really confused the first time I played it because I thought I was Snake, because at the start Raiden comes in with the mask and obviously it’s obviously not Snake because you can see his blonde hair, the voice acting is different. And I just remember being really confused that this guy was called Snake and had blonde hair. Anyway, you see the real Snake go up in the lift. You go up in the lift yourself and you realize, you know, oh, you know, I’m this guy now. I had no idea it was coming. It didn’t annoy me. I have to say, like I think there’s this… You said I had strong feelings about Raiden. I want that to be… I want this to be clear. I don’t dislike Raiden at all. I think he’s a brilliant, brilliant character. But I do think there’s this kind of, like, certain critical assumptions just kind of encrust around games. And this idea that, like, everyone got to the bit with Raiden, saw that they weren’t Snake, and immediately kind of threw their pad at the television in disgust, it is just nonsense. You know, it was like I imagine most players probably felt like I do. Maybe that’s a bit egotistical to say, but I was just confused, and I wanted to find out more. And also, like, I think it’s underdone how cool Raiden is. You know, there are things done to undermine them as a character. You know, the simple fact that Snake goes up in the elevator before him. Snake was there first. Famously the fact that the first rooftop you get to on the Big Shell is covered in seagull shit, and he can fall over, and he really crap falls, you know, it’s like, again, it’s Kojima going into kind of Benny Hill mode, you know, it’s just like pure physical comedy. And there are lots of little touches like that, like, as you go through the game, the game subtly puts Raiden down in some ways, but it does him up in others as well, you know, like, I always thought the cartwheel was magnificent. Like, as soon as I found out he could cartwheel, I remember just cartwheeling around that roof fridge, just cartwheeling over the bird shit, like, I’m not slipping this time. And you can obviously go straight into the crawl from the cartwheel as well. The other thing about Raiden, and like, I think this is one of the reasons I always really liked him as a character, even though it’s not a positive character trait, is that he’s quite petulant. And actually, I think Quentin Flynn, Raiden’s voice actor, is a really underrated voice actor. I think when, so obviously I’ve been playing the game through again recently, and it’s like, Raiden starts to question what this whole experience is from the very start. You know, you can tell from some of the things he says in the codec conversations that he just thinks, he just knows something isn’t up. And he’s kind of asking the questions the player is asking as well. So one of the things about Raiden, just going back to the design document for a moment, is that the kanji for his name originally was basically the Japanese equivalent of U. He was always intended to be this kind of cipher inhabited by the player, if you like, a theme that Kojima would return to with great success. I think the document translates it as thyself. Yeah, well, there you go. You play as thyself slash Raiden. Yeah, indeed. So when I hit the shell, I was enormously confused for the first couple of hours. Then I just kind of got into it. And one of the other slight misconceptions about this game, if you haven’t played it, is that people say, oh, there’s the Solid Snake chapter in the tanker and then there’s the Raiden bits. But actually, Solid Snake is with you throughout the entire of the shell. I mean, he’s not literally with you the whole time, but you see him very early. You meet him afterwards. He calls himself Pliskin, obviously an Escape from New York reference. You know it’s Snake from the start. I mean, definitely if you’ve played Metal Gear Solid, you know it’s Snake. It’s David Hayther right there in front of you going, Solid Snake’s dead. And you’re like, yeah, I think I’ll take a rain check on that one, Dave. So it’s a bit like, let me think of an analogy. If you went in to see a Batman movie, right, and the first half hour was just Batman, but then the rest of the movie was about Batman training Robin to be his successor, and it followed Robin a bit more, but Batman was there the whole time, kind of guiding him and helping him out, blah, blah, blah. Sounds like a good movie, I’d watch that. Yeah, and well, that’s what this is. We’ve obviously talked about control. One of the other big themes of Metal Gear Solid 2: is passing the torch. The whole point of Raiden is that this is the next generation, the next soldier after Snake who’s going to be doing the good shit and going in and saving the world from these bipedal nuclear mechs whenever it’s needed. It’s about that difference between the grizzled veteran that Solid Snake is fighting purely for principle and Raiden who will get there in the end but at the moment is still a very young soldier. I mean, it’s famously his first mission, isn’t it? Yeah, so having just been playing parts of the Raiden sections today, I think that you’re right in that he’s always questioning what’s going on from the start. Like that very first conversation with Snake, he kind of susses out that he’s in the dark and that he’s not entirely clear on what’s going on. And then when he meets Aims later on using the directional microphone, you get the same thing where he thinks he’s there because there’s a ransom and a kidnapping and the truth is much more complicated. And then obviously when he meets the president, it takes on another layer of complication. And he is kind of aware. I agree that he’s not like a complete dud, as he was maybe discussed as at the time. So one thing I did feel like with The Big Shell is that I don’t think it necessarily has the same zoomed in detail feel that the Tanker does. Just because maybe it’s because it’s like the the fact that the Tanker was created as this little tech demo, where it was about like, you know, break these glass bottles at this bar or like, you know, this frying pans you can punch or whatever it might be. The Raven figure, Vulcan Raven figure on the on the ground. It feels like a blank place to me. And maybe it’s got less identity to it. I was wondering, Rich, if you think that’s a fair charge and whether how you think that the Tanker and the plant compare as sort of like overall stealth experiences. Oh, it’s a tough one. I mean, I think you’re right, generally. You know, the Tanker feels like such a richer, more textured environment in terms of the interiors. And, you know, especially the exterior, like the exterior, the big shell is pretty characterless. All you ever do out there is kind of shoot seagulls and do pull ups. Yeah, it has this weird kind of like, you know, we were talking about the authenticity earlier, and they obviously decided they wanted to be very faithful to how an industrial plant like this might be built. And I think actually in Metal Gear 5, they returned to that with enormous success in terms of Mother Base. Like, I think Mother Base in Metal Gear 5 reminds me of Big Shell, like an awful, awful lot. It doesn’t have the character of the Tanker. It has these slightly weird interiors where it’ll have kind of like generic corridors around them. Then it’ll have a really little detailed little bit in the middle, which I always find kind of quite amusing. And you get other rooms that like they look massive on the map. And then you go in and it’s like one little gantry around the outside. So yeah, it doesn’t quite have the character of the Tanker. I guess the flip side of that is that when you get to the end of it that, you know, the stuff that starts happening when the Big Shell, well, whatever it is, whether it’s reality or whether it’s not, when everything starts collapsing, then I think you start to get some of that kind of visual spectacle and pizzazz we associate with the series. So it’s like, it’s not it’s not quite as simple as like Tanker is better than Shell. I think it does have a lot more character. I also think they ring quite a lot of the Shell of this kind of like, what would it be like being in this kind of like entirely functional industrial environment with just an army out to get you? And again, it’s that kind of fidelity to whatever the reality might be that I kind of admire and how they approach the design of that. But I guess one of the things I talk about, I don’t know if you were going to ask me about it, it’s Fat Man. And in that regard, what do you think the significance of Fat Man is in the course of the Big Shell sequence, Rich? It’s my favourite bit in the game before the end where it all collapses basically. I think Dead Cell is the name of all the kind of bosses in the game. Kojima has this habit of kind of grouping together his bosses. So in Metal Gear 4, you get Beauty and the Beast Unit. In Metal Gear 3, it’s the Cobra Unit. In this one, it’s Dead Cell. I think Dead Cell has some real duds. Vamp in particular is never sat right with me. And a lot of people like say Vamp is the moment where, you know, Metal Gear kind of went off the deep end. It’s like, you know, obviously walking nuclear mechs are one thing, but Vampire, get out of here. There’s a great bit in the Substance documentary where Yoji Shinkawa, who is the character designer for the Metal Gear series, is saying, Mr. Kojima came to me and said there would be a vampire in Metal Gear Solid 2:. At first, I thought he was joking, but then I realized he was serious. And he just gives this thousand yards stare. I think Fat Man is one of the exceptions to that. A lot more subtle. Yeah, he should be in Death Stranding, really. So it’s a whole little sequence, which I think is one of the things I like about it so much. It really uses the environment a big shell in a clever way. So you’ve just seen a SEAL team that came in. You’ve seen them get wiped out by some of the bosses. Well, Fortune, actually, whose whole deal is that she can’t be hit by weapons and spends her whole time going, won’t someone please kill me, which I find quite annoying actually, because I’d love to kill her and eventually. So you’ve seen the SEAL team wiped out and then their bomb disposal guy is left behind. And Fat Man is Dead Cell’s bomb disposal guy. And your bomb disposal guy is basically like classic Danny Glover. It’s like, like, I think he even says, like, you know, I had to come out of retirement for this. I’m sure he says something like that. He’s pure, pure Danny Glover. Fat Man’s his pupil. You’re with Snake at this point. He gives you both a little freezy gun. Says we can’t disarm the bombs. There’s one on each strut. There are 12 struts total. So, you know, Snake is going to go and find six and you’re going to take the other six. And you have a little, I can’t remember what it’s called, ionization bomb detector or something. Oh, right. The thing that beeps. Yeah, sorry. Oh, well, there’s two. There’s one that gives you a kind of like gas cloud. And the bomb will be somewhere within that cloud. And then later you get one that, yeah, the beeps get closer as you get nearer to the bomb. So you have to find these six bombs. You can’t freeze them when you’re in alert mode. Or I think you can freeze them. But if you get shot, it kind of resets and stuff. So you don’t want to have been seen, basically. So it leans into the stealth element. It makes you go through all six parts of the big shell you’ve already been through. You have a bit more kit now. You have a few more weapons. You have a few more types of grenades. You have some cardboard boxes. And the positions of the bombs are really creative. I really admire Kojima’s, the way he thinks about 3D. It was there from the very start in Metal Gear Solid, where there is a bit in the very first area where, what is it, if you walk up somewhere, you can see a ration that you couldn’t see from your normal perspective. He is so good at those kind of perspective tricks and putting something in a place where you have almost looked at it and you have been like, no, he never put it up there. So you go and spend half an hour checking everywhere else and then you are like, oh my God. So the first one, he tells you, Stillman, the bomb disposal guy on your side, he says, there is one here. There is one in the strut we are in right now. It is in a place you would never think to go. And what he means is it is in the women’s bathroom. I had already been in the women’s bathroom because I am quite a thorough player. When you go into the women’s bathroom, you can hear the beep. The only way to… So the bomb is hidden on the roof, in a gap above a cubicle that you can’t see from any perspective with Raiden looking through first-person view normally. So how do you think you see it? How do you think you find it? I genuinely can’t remember. It’s the mirror. Oh, right. You have to stand at a particular position. And if you look at the mirror, you can see it reflected in the mirror. And if you know it’s there, you can gauge where to aim your freeze spray and get it. But that’s just an example of the kind of thing where he puts these bombs in places. It almost feels… It’s a little bit like Miyamoto’s great trick, you know, like Miyamoto’s games. You find something and it makes you feel wonderful because you feel like you’ve discovered it yourself. And with that particular sequence, like Kijima makes you feel so clever when you’ve worked out the little trick he’s done to hide the bomb. And yeah, I find that sequence a real, real pleasure. And then you end it with the fight against Fat Man, which I think is one of his best boss fights. So Fat Man is this… Oh, there’s a hilarious line about Fat Man. He does pull them off occasionally. Solid Snake says something like, says he was named after an atomic bomb, but he’s just a fat man to me. I mean, I don’t know. I liked it. So Fat Man is in a blast suit. He’s got rollerblades on, or they might be roller skates. You’re on a helipad, basically some pallets around, storage crates. He roller skates around, he shoots at you with an Uzi, and then he plants bombs as you’re fighting him. So it’s basically got a lot going on, and there’s a lot of ways you can approach it. Like the easy way to approach it is to claymore mine the area. So when he tries to roller skate away from you, of course he goes straight into a claymore. When he’s down on the ground, his big bald head is exposed, and you can get a headshot. Normally you can’t hit him because of the blast suit. That fight, he actually got me a couple of times, because it’s got this great balance of I think I’m getting him, I think I’m getting him. He puts down the bombs and he changes the timers on them, and you don’t always look. So at first you’re like, oh, I’ve got 90 seconds to get that bomb, no problem, I’ll just shoot him in the head. And then later on he’s setting them with 30 second timers. So there was one case where I was fighting him last week. I got him down to his end health, and my video game brain was just like, I don’t need to worry about that bomb, I’m just going to blow his head off and the cutscene will play. I shot him, of course the cutscene didn’t play, because this is a Kojima game, and the bomb went off and I lost the fight, so that was annoying. That hour and a half I would say, I don’t know how long that sequence takes. Actually, I would say it’s a good two hours, because you have to spend quite a lot of time thinking about these bombs. It shows off everything these games are good at. It encourages stealth. It encourages you to explore a 3D space and think about it in a slightly different way. And then at the end you’ve got this payoff of a great boss fight, where you’re using everything you’ve learned. So when he’s hiding the bombs, he doesn’t just leave them on the floor. He’ll put them under a helicopter, he’ll put them on top of something, he’ll put them under something, he’ll put them at an angle you can’t see unless you run around it and use first person mode. So it’s kind of like, I love that Kojima has the kind of confidence in players to be like, yeah, to give you that challenge, to just say you’re smart enough to work this out. So, I’m not going to hold back. Yeah, I think that, like you say, the really kind of good bit of, the really good design flourish there is having a boss that kind of caps off the whole bomb disposal idea and like encourages you to use the skills you’ve already done. I would say that like the other bosses in the game don’t really do that. They are kind of just bosses in isolation. Do you think that’s fair? Yeah, they are. I just want to quickly mention, at the end of the Fat Man boss fight, he goes, you haven’t won, I’ve got one more bomb. Ha ha ha ha ha. And he does have one more bomb and you have to find it. Do you remember how you find it? You drag him out the way, right? Yeah, you’ve got to pick him up and drag his big old corpse out the way, then freeze it, which I always thought was just an amazing touch. I remember being really confused by that the first time it happened and not finding it. So yeah, they got me. The other bosses, I think they’re kind of good fights. With Vamp, I don’t like the character. Fortune just kind of annoys me. There’s something really irritating about characters whose whole schtick is just like, Oh, when sweet death come for me, I can’t take one more day of this benighted existence. And that’s her whole deal. Do you ever properly fight her? I thought there was like a sort of gimmick fight that you can’t win. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s a fight where you can shoot at her. All the bullets go around her. I think, you know, obviously they were all big fans of the Matrix. So she’s kind of the Matrix boss. Did anyone try just punching her? Because her little fucking Patriots device, can that like deflect punches? That’s my question. Because like Snake getting real close, surely he could just like choke her out like every other enemy he kills in the game, you know? Is that implausible, Rich? Do you think a punch could be deflected by the Patriots device that she wears? I don’t know. I mean, the Patriots go pretty deep, don’t they? So I imagine they’ve thought about, you know, a punch. I don’t know, maybe it’s like sort of the Dune Armour, where, you know, bad against bullets, great against bullets, but up close and slow, you’re doomed. Yeah, so just to answer your question anyway, I think, is it Snake fights? Snake fights her later, but then Ocelot kills her, I think? Yeah, that’s right. You see Snake, it kind of happens off screen. You disappear up the ladder to fight Metal Gear Ray and then Snake fights Fortune and loses. In that design document, it has two other members of Dead Cell that aren’t in the game. Weirdly, one of them sounds like basically the really old geezer from Metal Gear Solid 3. Is it the end? Yeah. It’s basically a prototype for him called Old Man, I think. And the other one, which I’m really glad he didn’t put in, was Chinaman. Yeah, actually though, Chinaman is an unfortunate name, but the concept for that guy was… I think he was a weapon stealer or something stupid like that as a backstory, but he has a massive kind of Yakuza-like dragon tattoo on his back. Yeah. And I think actually he was replaced by the Vamp Boss fight, because the Vamp Boss fight takes place around water, if I’m remembering right. Yeah. And the Chinaman was supposed to fight you around the pool of water, and then he dived into the water, and when he dove into the water, his dragon tattoo would come alive and basically start just, you know, flaming your ass up, and you couldn’t fight the dragon. So you had to dive into the water and get the Chinaman and kind of drag him back to the surface, which sounds amazing, but is probably why they weren’t able to do it. You know they had sharks in it? Yeah. They had sharks for the underwater sections. And if you bled when you were in there. I think Kojima said something like the idea was you had to like deliberately cut yourself to kind of lead them somewhere away from where you wanted to go. And then when they all came to the blood, you kind of swum through. But he said the playtesters found it too stressful, which, you know, big surprise really. I mean, yeah, I don’t like sharks in games generally. So, Rich, we’ve covered like the sort of bomb disposal stuff there. I was curious about what you make of the game’s sort of, well, the big shell sequences, second half basically, because I feel like it stalls a little bit, it runs out of momentum a little bit and like piles on the story and then kind of like kicks into life again when you’re on arsenal gear at the end. What do you kind of make of the second half of the big shell? I think it’s the game generally has a problem with where exposition is, if you like. Like, of all the games that could have used some of their lore, like being buried in a menu screen where you could just read it when you’re interested, this would have really benefited from that because it kind of doesn’t have an off switch. It just bombards you with so much tedious exposition at times and it has these kind of very annoying characters. I find Rose incredibly irritating. Just none of the charm of Mei Ling. It’s so weird as well that you’re raiding this kind of super soldier, saving the president, taking down Metal Gear, and you’ve got your slightly depressed girlfriend on the phone the whole time going like, Jack, do you remember what day it is tomorrow? And you’re like, fuck off, save my game. So there’s this combination of slightly unlikable characters, I think, because the Colonel is not very nice in this one either for obvious reasons. And then, yeah, you reach that stage, you’re talking about whatever point it is, and I think you just kind of put down the pad for pretty much 45 minutes at a time, pick it up again, do a five minute sequence, and you’re back in. There was something really funny earlier, I thought, I know I want to talk about Fat Man at some point, so I’m going to look up how the bomb placements change. Obviously, I’m sorry, but I wasn’t going to play it all through on Hard again, just for that. So I looked at the IGN guide, and it had obviously been written by somebody who just hated the game. So the first line in it was like, once yet another never-ending cinema comes to a close, you’ll have to hunt down and find six bombs. And it’s like, oh my god, mate, you just wait five hours from now, you know? Yeah, it’s a problem in this game particularly. I think it’s a problem in all of Kojima’s games that there reaches a point where he’s just like, okay, here’s the info dump. And there’s some great stuff in there. You know, there’s absolutely some of the most prophetic and interesting stuff a video game has said so far. And it’s just surrounded by a lot of garbage, you know? Some people might argue that effect was intentional, given the themes, I would say not. Yeah, I think that a big problem it has is that Kojima’s constantly trying to show you how much he’s learned about how the real military works, and so you get a lot of explanation of really boring kind of like military jargon or real life training programs and things that are kind of adjacent to Metal Gear’s fiction as a kind of like way in. But because there’s so much in the way of like US government stuff in this kind of piled on by Ames and the president, that then like backs on to the Patriot stuff. It just becomes, yeah, very, very messy. And obviously like one of the reasons that MGS3 would seem such like a palette cleanser by comparison is it doesn’t have nearly as much of that stuff. And it gives you kind of a break. But yeah, yeah, sorry. No, no, it’s funny you mentioned Metal Gear 3 in that context because I think the whole reason that game is the way it is is because this was the way it was. I can only imagine how frazzled the brains of the development team must have been coming off this and Kojima himself, of course. And it’s like Metal Gear 3, one of the reasons it’s probably the most beloved Metal Gear game. It is a simple story. It is probably the simplest story he’s told, arguably the most effective. It goes for, I would say, more understandable themes in a more paired back way. I mean, it still has that kind of parallel to real world events. Obviously, in this case, it’s the Cold War. But yeah, I think Kojima and his team had to make Metal Gear 3 after making this, because this is such an overreaching game. And I think one of the sad things about it is it’s one of the only ones I’ve ever really seen in whatever you want to call it, the blockbuster, the AAA space. So many of them play it safe. It’s like so few really go out there and throw everything at it. And I feel like Kojima Productions for good or ill always did. I think this was the biggest statement of intent I’ve ever seen a developer make, really. I can’t think of anything else quite like it. Yeah, for sure. There’s one last thing I want to ask you about before we move on to discussing the themes a little bit more. We can get more into the second half of the game, which it’s hard to divorce the themes of this game from the actual game itself in a lot of ways. Here’s something I thought playing the HD version again today. I think Metal Gear Solid 2: is a slightly better stealth game than Metal Gear Solid 3, because it’s easier to read visually, I think, and you always feel like you’ve got a handle on how its stealth systems work, because there aren’t that many of them. They’re quite intricate, but there aren’t that many of them. MGS3, I think, is a bit more unwieldy, because you have things like the camouflage and the healing and stuff like that. I was curious if you agreed, Rich, and what kind of you make of the two games comparatively as stealth experiences. I think it’s hard to compare them, because Metal Gear 3 brings in so many new systems. Like CQC is a game changer. Until this point in Metal Gear 2:, if you’re in close combat with a guard, you’re doing a three-hit combo sequence that will knock them to the ground. From Metal Gear 3 onwards, you’re able to just grab them, hold them up, interrogate them, knock them out, kill them if you like. So I actually think one of the things with Metal Gear is that it almost kind of… I’m not going to say… What would the right word be? It almost undercuts some of the things it does very well by giving the player more tools. But that’s completely in Metal Gear’s nature. You know, it’s like once you have a tranquilizer gun, then you’re making an active decision to shoot someone with a real gun and hear that horrible sound effect and see the blood spurting out of their head. Whereas before, you didn’t really have an option. When you can just sneak up behind enemies and grab them and choke them out and drag them into the grass, yeah, it’s making it different. It’s making it easier for the player. I don’t know if that’s better. I just think of them as so different. I agree that when you get stuff like the camouflage system in Metal Gear 3, it’s a real pain. You don’t want to be going into a menu to be like, oh, I want the crocodile strike now. This fern shade is way off. I did think killing the animals was fun. That makes me sound like a psychopath. I thought hunting your dinner was fun. There was a real Bear Grylls vibe to that. And the funny little voice effects, like when you eat a snake, and he really enjoys that one, so he’s like, tasty. Could have probably done without healing yourself up aspects of it. But I think the thing you’re tuning into with Metal Gear 2: is that that was kind of the last leap forward for the series in terms of the guard AI and what that stealth system was going to be. Because when you get to the time in Metal Gear 5, it’s much more sophisticated. It’s much better to control. I mean, that is one of the things about going back to Metal Gear Solid 2: now is that first-person aiming is not aged as well as some of the rest of the game. But fundamentally, I think you can make a good argument that the guards in Metal Gear Solid 2: are pretty much the same with less impressive AI as they are in 4 and 5. So it’s kind of like between Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2:, there’s such an enormous leap in the fidelity of the stealth simulation. And everything after that, I really feel is just like addition and positive addition. I definitely think Metal Gear 5 is my favorite game in the series. But yeah, the reason Metal Gear Solid 2: is so important in the context of the series is that this is, for me, the giant leap in that respect. And yeah, comparing it to Metal Gear 3’s approach to stealth, it was like, I don’t think they got it perfect in Metal Gear 3 either. I definitely see what you mean. I think you had more tools in Metal Gear 3, and that almost undercuts it while making it probably a better game for most people, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think so. If there’s one reason I would praise the big shell and tanker in terms of their visual design, it is that it is easy to read where your character is at any time, and it is easy to read where the enemies are. And one of the reasons that subsistence needed to add that third-person camera is because it was never really that easy to read Metal Gear Solid 3 with that top-down camera. Metal Gear Solid 2:, you’re actually fine with how the camera is placed because the environments feel so calibrated towards it. And then, yeah, because 3 has that expanded scope, it almost needs to have that additional layer of player information, basically, because you’re in a jungle and you can’t see what the fuck’s going on sometimes. So, yeah, I mean, that was just like an observation I had from playing 2: today. I was actually surprised by how well the stealth experience held up, you know. So, Matthew, I was curious to know a bit about what you made of Metal Gear Solid 2: and what point you kind of came to the series, because I realise I haven’t asked you much about it yet, but curious to hear about what your experience was with it. While I wasn’t kind of pulled into the hype cycle around it, I definitely played this quite early on. I’m trying to think how I played it. We either rented it or something, and I played it in a day-long session. And rather, like, shamefully, I kind of ran out of patience with it, just as it gets into all the meaty thematic stuff and the big twists. And I distinctly remember the first time playing it, like, skipping a lot of codec conversations and getting to the end of the game and not really having any clue about why I was fighting this dude in the flaming remains of New York and just being like, well, that was dumb, even though I’d skipped all the context for it. It’s weird, you know, what you were saying about 2: versus 3. I really loved the clarity and almost like the straight lines of everything in 2: makes it a very simple sort of stealth game to play. Like it’s, you know, the big shell and tanker almost have more in common with like the VR missions in terms of like the visual design. And then all of a sudden I found 3 quite overwhelming and I felt very bad. I was bad at 3 for quite a long time. Like where 2:, I kind of felt like a pretty cool spy from the off and throughout. I only really remember this game being set pieces. And I think that sort of goes to what you were saying earlier about, you know, the big shell is this more functional space. You know, it doesn’t have as many like weird and sort of characterful rooms to it, maybe as some of the other Metal Gears. You know, especially coming off the tanker, which I’d spent, you know, tens of hours exploring from the Zone of Enders demo. You know, all of a sudden, you know, I don’t know if I’ve spent a third of the time in the big shell as I did in that tanker, even though the tanker is technically a much shorter part of the game. Yeah, for sure. I think one of the odd things is it’s like, it’s their first attempt at building a kind of a big coherent environment. Because it’s like, if you look at Metal Gear Solid, I mean, Shadow Moses is amazing. It’s also like wildly all over the place, you know, like think about like Psycho Mance’s like incredibly opulent office that’s just like next to, you know, I think is it next to a kitchen or something? And then you walk out of Psycho Mance’s office and it’s like, are you in the snow again? And then there’s like a lava works shortly after that. And it’s like, you know, it’s just jamming together. And, you know, I think in the PlayStation era, you could, PlayStation 1 era, you could do that without anyone raising much of an eyelid. But it wasn’t, it didn’t approach Shadow Moses in quite the way I would say that like Resident Evil approached the Arkley Mansion. And I think with Metal Gear 2:, that was one of the kind of big objectives was to build a kind of more coherent environment. And it’s, yeah, it’s one of the things about the big shell that like you kind of touched on there is, you know, there is always that open question, is this a VR mission? You know, and I think elements like it’s kind of very clean, simple, straight line design. It depends how far you want to go down the rabbit hole, you know, whether you think that’s kind of intentional or not, whether you think it’s kind of clueing you in the whole way along that this might not all be real. But I think it’s kind of possible, you know, given that he knew this was where they were going. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think I agree with you, Matthew. You know, what I realized playing it again today as well was how much like dialogue from the tanker sequence was burned into my head, like the whole speech from Dolph or whatever he’s called, the dude giving the speech and then Olga as well saying, conflict and victory were my parents. And I was like, how is this like, this is scorched into my brain. Like, I’ve heard that probably about 200 times just from playing the demo over and over again. So yeah, that’s kind of a bizarre thing. But I think that’s a good point to call a break. And then when we’ll come back, we’ll try and tackle this game’s themes because holy shit, there’s a lot to get into there. Welcome back to the podcast. So, in this section, we’re gonna talk a bit more about Metal Gear Solid 2’s themes. It’s such a big part of the game that we couldn’t, it was tough to try and break down the sort of game part in one section and the themes in another, because they’re so interlinked, as I said earlier. But I did kind of roughly want to sort of like break them apart so we could focus on the stealth stuff and the overall sort of like arc of the game design before we get into this. So first up then, Rich, really curious to know, this game obviously mirrors the original Metal Gear Solid by design, and it’s a sequel that comments on sequels. I was curious if coming into this the first time, you suspected this at all before the big reveal, if you can even remember, it’s been so many years, and kind of what you make of that notion generally as a sort of conceit at the heart of the game. It’s definitely something I came to appreciate about it, kind of over multiple playthroughs. You know, it’s like the first time I played Metal Gear Solid 2:, I always tell people it was just like in a thug of confusion, you know, a thug, a fog, whatever one of those kind of miasmas is where you can’t quite work out what you’re doing, but you’re just moving forwards anyway because you think you like it. Yeah, I would say, you know, in terms of its big themes, when I actually started thinking about them was when I got more interested in the game later. On my first playthrough, I didn’t really notice the parallels to Metal Gear Solid, you know, apart from the very obvious ones, you know, like the torture sequence. There’s a couple of things Snake says that are the same. When I really got into Metal Gear Solid, which was probably after Metal Gear 3 and before Metal Gear 4, I’d always loved the games. And at that kind of point, that was when I started really reading into Kojima’s history and the series’ history. I started looking back through the scripts and taking it very seriously. And I think that’s when you notice this stuff, you know? It’s one of the things that slightly bothers me about this. And it’s the same with Dark Souls as well. The genius of Dark Souls and the genius of Metal Gear Solid 2: is that it can be played as a straight up action game. You can play Dark Souls, you can get to the end, kill Gwyn and feel that you’ve done the right thing. I mean, you might wonder why your guy’s gone up in flames, but it fulfills what it needs to do for someone to play it and just be like, yep, that was a good AAA action game. I think Metal Gear 2: does those, hits those beats. And then the paralleling of the first game is kind of like, I think it’s more subtle than a lot of people make out now. You know, so when you’re talking about like the bosses, Dead Cell, for example, mirroring elements of Metal Gear Solid bosses, that is true. At the same time, they are their own creations. You know, so we talked about Fat Man, for example. Fat Man is often compared to Vulcan Raven from the first one. Vulcan Raven, you fought him in an environment filled with shipping containers. And he had a massive chain gun and he would walk around. He was slow and you would have to get behind him, flank him. Fat Man is a very similar environment. Fat Man, unlike Vulcan Raven, is moving fast. And he’s making you move fast because you have to run around and get the bombs. So you have this kind of thing where… And Vulcan Raven, obviously, is a little tribute to him early on in Metal Gear Solid 2:. You see a little figure of him, or sorry, you see a shadow in the tanker, which you think is him. And I think it stops for a second. And David Hader, you know, chews the scenery and is like, Vulcan Raven? And then you realize it’s a little figure. So it does mirror it. But I almost feel like the more appropriate word is palimpsest. You know, it’s written over the top of Metal Gear Solid. Part of that is the sequelitis you’re talking about. Like, I think one of the things Kijima resents from sequels is that whatever players say they want, what they actually want is more of the same. And he doesn’t want to do that. But he knows that people want to see Solid Snake. He knows that people will expect another Psycho Mantis. And that’s kind of the tension. I think that’s the tension in the whole game. I think mirroring it is like a bit strong, but it’s something that is more subterranean, I think, than it’s given credit for. It’s not, and I’ve been guilty of this myself in the past when I’ve written about it. I’ve said it like this is the most obvious thing in the world. And actually I don’t think it… It’s obvious when you point it out. Let me put it that way. Yeah, I agree with you. I think the most obvious beat I got from playing it again today was the vamp sequence, which is obviously meant to, you know, parallel the Grey Fox, kind of like murder and murders in the corridor. That’s very obvious. But I think that there are several things in it that throw you off. The presence of the real Solid Snake, obviously, that’s something that kind of like adds a bit of early confusion because you’re kind of like, you know, this other character is joining you along for the ride. There’s not really a parallel to that. The bomb disposal thing and then like Steelman as a character, there’s not exactly a parallel to that really in Metal Gear Solid. And like, obviously it is built into the plot that, you know, you are undergoing an elaborate simulation at the behest of the Patriots. So this, you know, essentially this Solid Snake simulation, that’s at least part of their overall plan. But yeah, I think I agree with you. I don’t think it’s actually like, I don’t think I thought about it at all when I first played it. I think as a player, my first experience with this game was kind of like running headfirst at all this like conspiracy storytelling and trying to pass who are the Patriots and then having my mind blown when at the end I learned that the Wise Men’s Committee all died a hundred years ago and thinking, what the fuck does that mean? That was those are the parts I kind of like was stuck onto. I was really fascinated by the mystery of like Ryden not really knowing what the mission was and what was really going on at the heart of the big shell. All that other stuff comes, I’ve kind of like picked it up from readings of it, I suppose, like, you know, you read this stuff and you go back and you play it and you see what you can pick up on beats wise. Yeah, so there are some obvious bits and some not so much. This may be a really stupid question and may completely undermine my entire presence on this podcast. No, go for it. What happened to the Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2:? That’s real, right? In the real world. Yes, yeah, he’s like, he is a real, you know, a real soldier. It isn’t all virtual reality. No, but the whole thing is staged, essentially. Like, every person has their part. So it’s like it’s a staged operation, essentially. There are some parts that are, you know, like the arrival of the real Solid Snake is one of the twists to it. Like, that’s not supposed to happen. That’s not part of what’s being simulated. But Raiden is, you know, like you’ll learn later on, was a child soldier, then he was trained in VR as well. And then, like, then this is his first proper, quote unquote, mission. And then, yeah, and then the mission is designed to mimic the Ark of Shadow Moses. That is worth saying for people listening to this podcast who haven’t played this game for a long time. That’s always thrown me a little bit, I think, because of that initial play through where I skipped some of the stuff towards the end. And then I was like, did any of it happen? I don’t really know. I mean, that is, that’s my reading of it, Rich. Is that correct? Or is there another part of it? I’d say broadly. I mean, it’s one of those games where there’s so much in it that I think you probably could make a good argument. The whole thing is a simulation. You know, I don’t believe that, but like, if you went by the front end, for example, and the way it uses AI, it kind of is. So I don’t know if you recall, but when you’re in the big shell, each strut has a little map terminal. So you’ve got to find the map terminal and log on to it. And then you’ve got the map for that area so you can see where guards are looking. And every time you do that, it’s got this very interesting little touch where it takes you out to the options menu. It gives you the game’s option menu when you log on to the terminal. You’re like, why are you seeing this? Why is it asking me if I want to turn blood off? Why is it asking if I want subtitles on now? So there’s all these little subtle things where it’s constantly using the video game interface within that world to make it seem very video gaming. And yeah, I agree with you. I don’t think the whole thing is a simulation. It is a somewhat manufactured event that doesn’t go as it is supposed to go. But it’s… I mean, what can you say? It’s like… It’s a… I don’t really want to swear, but a cluster F in certain respects about whether it’s real or it isn’t. I’m curious, have you ever played The Big Shell without playing the tanker first? No, I don’t think I have, Matthew, have you? I didn’t even know that was an option. Yeah, so at the start, you can select either the tanker or the big shell. Imagine skipping the tanker. And obviously, if you select the tanker, it just naturally flows on to the big shell. It doesn’t take you back out into that menu. But if you select the big shell first, then it starts there. You’ll have a different conversation with the colonel when Raiden comes out of the water. And basically, if you’ve done the tanker mission, he says, you’re familiar with this area because you did the tanker mission in VR. And if you haven’t done it, he’ll basically say the opposite. He’ll say, you don’t know what went on here, but there was a mission involving Solid Snake. Forgive me, I can’t remember the exact dialogue. Which implies that the tanker is a VR simulation that you’re actually playing as Raiden, which I think is probably the case. And that when you think you’re Solid Snake, which would be very Kojima, you’re actually Raiden thinking he’s Solid Snake. But I’m conscious as I say that, like, I don’t want to get too far into the fields of wankery here, because a lot of the game is about, you know, like, Solid Snake calls Raiden a virtual grunt of the digital age. It’s not just about the game setup itself. It’s about how video games create a particular idea of war, I guess you could say, and spoon-feed it to people who then think they know what war is like, you know, and you couldn’t have a more perfect example, of course, than Call of Duty and its various deals with arms manufacturers. So again, you know, another very prescient thing for Konami and Kojima to be taking aim at. So how best to explain what happens in this story? So in the, where the tanker sinks and Ocelot steals Metal Gear Ray, that’s the first part of the game. That’s Liquid Snake! That’s Liquid Snake, Sam! It is, yeah. So you were saying that… That’s awful, that twist. Jesus. You were saying that Vamp breaks the reality of the game. I mean, I would say that as soon as you see the Liquid Snake arm take over Ocelot, you’re immediately like, what the fuck is going on? They would kind of retcon that in Metal Gear Solid 4. Kojima has made some stinking narrative decisions over the years. That is the worst. And even he realized it, because he doesn’t often retcon his stuff, you know, he’ll try and find a way to make it work. But like, Ocelot becoming Liquid because he was taken over by his arm and getting this awful, like, like Liquid Snake always reminds me of like Roger Waters, you know, the Pink Floyd frontman, you know, and I love Pink Floyd, but I always imagine when he’s kind of like, Snake, you won’t stop me now in his slightly posh voice. It’s like, yeah, it was awful. I think in Metal Gear 4, they retcon it and it’s like, oh, Ocelot was just pretending to be Liquid Snake to get into Solidus’ good graces or something like that. It’s horseshit. I mean, it’s, I love this series. I love the themes, the whole Liquid Snake, Ocelot arm thing, just awful honking, man. It really is. So, yeah, I mean, I love your impressions, by the way, Rich. It’s like, your Otacon, your Otacon was like Gilbert Gottfried, which I thought was great. I enjoyed that a lot. Yeah, they’re just really, they’re really just all over the shop and I’m having a great time. It’s good. I personally think, I agree with you, there’s something about the Liquid Snake voice that makes more sense in the PS1 era, but doesn’t quite make sense in the PS2 era coming out of Ocelot’s mouth. He’s just like, brothers, how long has it been? Such a silly voice. And yeah, shout out to Cam Clark there. So this story, right, the tanker goes down, Ocelot steals the Metal Gear Ray from the military, they pin it on Snake and Otacon, essentially their organization philanthropy. And then from there, it’s like it cuts forward two years, Raiden appears at Big Shell, Big Shell was essentially created to cover up a kind of like fake, it was essentially, essentially, it’s like a front for covering up like an oil spillage that happened. But as actually the site of Arsenal Gear, which is a kind of like a US military weapon that contains like an AI created by an organization known as the Patriots. And basically, while you initially think that Raiden is there on a kind of like sincere mission is like a ransom, it kind of unravels and it turns out that you are there as part of this S3 plan created by this AI, the Solid Snake Simulation. However, it’s later revealed that the Patriots have a much wider plan of which you’re just one small part, which is the S3 stands for Selection for Societal Sanity and the AI’s plan is to essentially filter out the junk of the online information age and control human thought by collating information that it deems worthy, removing free will in an effort to basically evolve mankind by collating what they think is important and telling people what to think essentially. And so that’s a really haphazard way of describing what’s going on in the story. But I can’t say that the game does a better job because it’s so all over the place. But there are parts of this that is incredibly prescient that has been praised in retrospect and it definitely seems ahead of the curve when it comes to the idea of fake news and algorithms and how information is presented to us. God, where to start with this, Rich? I suppose like, should we start with the design doc and how it kind of lays out what’s important here? No, no, we can’t because I haven’t read it recently. Yeah, why don’t you just kick off with some thoughts about all that then, I suppose. Well, yeah, where to start, indeed, there’s a great bit. I believe it’s on the Tanker chapter during a cut scene. It kind of reminds me of that bit from Other M where the guy’s helmet pops up and he says, remember me? And everyone’s like, who? And a guy just goes, you mean the lalilulalo? And you’re like, what? What is that? And you realize there’s some wacky stuff is going to happen here quite early on. In a weird way, people find it hard to agree how much of the design of these games is intentional and how much isn’t in terms of do it’s flaws, are they somehow sometimes deliberate? A lot of people have called this postmodern game, which would imply I’m not going to get into the whole postmodernism discussion, that when we’re talking about it having too many codec chats and taking out the game for hours and then it’s theme is information overload, that it’s doing that deliberately. As I said earlier, I don’t necessarily buy that. I think that’s just one of Kojima’s flaws. He’s always needed a copy editor, basically. I’m open for hiring, by the way, Codge Bro. Death Stranding 2: could be so much better. We’ll probably mention him, he probably will. He seems like quite a vain guy. I’ve never known a developer. And again, with that, is stamping Hideo Kojima everywhere? Is that a joke that got out of hand? Or is he like, I made this. I am Hideo Kojima. I mean, I don’t imagine there’s another fantastic impression for you, Sam. But yeah, it’s like, when you get to Metal Gear 5, and it’s like, it feels like every 10 minutes, it’s like, you know, directed by Hideo Kojima, written by Hideo Kojima, story planning, Hideo Kojima, making tea at half 10 on a Tuesday, Hideo Kojima. So it’s hard to tell how much of the kind of surfeit of information in the game and the way it serves it to you is part of the theme. It gives you a lot of information, is what I can say. And it’s a little bit like, this kind of relates to something you were saying earlier, Sam, but it’s, I find when or I find when I was going through Metal Gear Solid 2: the first couple of times, the experience was almost a little bit like watching a David Lynch film where, you know, I’m not the biggest Lynch fan in the world, but it’s like, to me, his work very much seems to be these kind of atmosphere pieces where you pick out, because everything that’s going on is so bizarre, you pick out a couple of things in it that you try to understand, and they’re your, like, anchors to trying to get some grasp on the rest of it. And that’s certainly how I felt kind of working my way through Metal Gear Solid 2:, you know, the first time I finished it, if somebody had asked me what just happened in that game, I would have been like, I spent a lot of time on an oil plant, and then I killed about 40 mechs, and 100 men, and the president at the end, and, you know, to be fair, that is what I did. I suppose I was just curious to know what you make of this game’s prescience, like, you know, that’s like a, such a massive part of why it’s remained in the conversation over the years. What do you make of how kind of like spot on it is about, you know, our current moment? It’s incredibly prescient about the fact that information is power and in an age where there is a surfeit of information, control of information is power. There is so much out there that no one person could ever possibly parse them, parse it themselves. And we rely overwhelmingly on gatekeepers, whether that is large media organizations, whether that is your favorite forum, whether it’s Twitter, whether it’s Facebook, all of these things in some different way control and present information to you. And you may look at an organization and think, okay, they’re well-intentioned, I trust them, I go along with that world view, at the same time, you are still putting yourself in a… I don’t want to use a loaded term here. You’re putting yourself in that particular world garden. And one of the things this game is incredibly prescient about is that I think it literally says at one point, everyone withdraws into their own small gated community. I think that’s one of the things the Colonel says when he’s kind of having his AI breakdown. And I do think that’s what’s happening. I think we see it all over the place in all sorts of contexts. I think in a weird way, the kind of opening up of society in the information age has made a lot of us much meaner. I think weirdly, it’s made a lot of people kind of stupider. And you also have to look at stuff like, okay, so I guess a good recent example would be the coronavirus vaccine. So in the UK, we’ve had our vaccine rollout for ages. I’ve had my two jabs. I’m sure you upstanding citizens have too. Obviously, there are the anti-vaxxers. Nobody likes the anti-vaxxers. If you see… Unless they like this podcast. Oh yeah, you know, anti-vaxxers who listen to The Back Page podcast. Now those guys might have a natural immunity. Don’t give us one star on Apple. Yeah. Oh my God, they probably would as well. You know, they’re very online people. However… Our reviews in Florida are about to fucking dip. Okay. So if we say that, you know, we three gentlemen think anti-vaxxers are generally quite silly and probably, you know, not having a good effect on society. At the same time, when you see that information on Facebook, it will come up with a massive, you know, disproven label. Twitter has these now as well, where when what they consider to be misinformation is being shared around, they’ll label it. And obviously that’s very clear cut when it comes to something like the coronavirus vaccination. You know, I think anti-vaxxers are stupid. I think most people would probably agree that those sites labeling that stuff as misinformation is a good thing. At the same time, it’s just an example of the control that something like Facebook has now where if a narrative can become powerful enough, and it doesn’t even necessarily have to be a big narrative, you know, I’m sure there are lots of ones going on right now that we’ll never be aware of. It can become true almost by default, simply by a gatekeeper saying it is true. Everyone hates Raiden, for example. Yeah, indeed. Indeed. Perfect example. So this, this, this to me is kind of the most prescient aspect of it, that, you know, when, when people were kind of talking about the internet and were a bit more starry-eyed about it, you know, we very much had this idea that information would free us, that, you know, the truth shall set you free, so to speak. And at one point, I think another one of the things the Colonel says in his AI rant is that the world is being engulfed in truth. And then, after that, he goes on to cite The Hollow Men by TS. Eliot. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Now, I’m sure as a good literary man, Matthew, you know that poem very well. The Hollow Man famously begins, I’ll do an impression of TS. Eliot, if you like, actually. Oh, nice. Yeah. We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men. And so the reason I think Kijima is referencing Eliot at that point is that Eliot was kind of talking about it more in terms of the horrors of modern society. He was quite a weird guy, Eliot, amazing writer, but a real oddball. So Eliot was talking about us being stuffed, but hollow in a different way. And Kijima is talking about us just being stuffed with meaningless information that takes over our whole lives. And yes, there may be truths among it, but it stops us actually, you know, I guess, you know, there’s no way to end this that isn’t really trite, but you know, finding our ultimate truth. You know, it’s basically that I think he’s just spot on in terms of how internet dynamics work. And I think a lot of these social media companies are still struggling with it themselves. You know, it’s like we recently had the Facebook whistleblower leak, whistleblower leak. That’s a bit of a tautology talking about how Facebook knows Instagram is harmful in some ways for its users, many of whom are young women. And it doesn’t know what to do about it. You know, it’s like Instagram is a very successful product. It wants to keep it running. It probably doesn’t like the fact that it seems to be harmful to users, but it’s not going to shut it down. And it doesn’t know what to do. And it’s not regulated from the outside. Absolutely not. You know, and but yeah, I think Kojima was absolutely spot on. Does Metal Gear Solid 2: end with just a, well, that’s the way the world is. Good luck with it. Is it? Does it? Like, that’s sort of my memory of it in that the, you know, the person you’re fighting is is, you know, fundamentally against all this too, right? Yeah, that’s like the final part of their plan is that you you kill Solidus essentially. And that’s like, you’re kind of taunted into doing it and like held ransom because, you know, basically that they have Olga’s child, Sonny, who you’ve pledged to go and save basically. So you are blackmailed into into doing that. But the way it resolves it, Matthew, is that Raiden essentially decides, you know, while talking to Snake that he will decide what to pass on as opposed to this Patriots AI deciding what people should think and what should be passed on. And that’s kind of the theme of the game sort of wrapped up. Is that right, Rich? And he chucks away your name as well. So at some point early on, you’re asked to enter your name for his dog tag. And there’s kind of this moment at the end of it, which is taken as very symbolic, where Raiden kind of rips off the dog tag with the player’s name on it. You know, the individual that’s been controlling him the whole way through tosses it away, which ties into kind of like, not just the theme, but you know, there is a level to this where one of the points of Metal Gear Solid 2: is that you’re being guided through your life by forces you don’t understand, and they are controlling you. And what a perfect metaphor a video game is for that. You know, it’s like Kojima is the puppet master, and Raiden is the puppet, but so are you. You know, you are following the path that he’s set. You are going to the discoveries he’s prepared for you. You know, whenever he says jump, you know, you might not ask how high, but you press the button. So it’s kind of like it’s a perfect match of theme, and I don’t know what you want to call it, format, mechanic, medium, perfect match of theme and medium. So I suppose like just to kind of like really boil this down, the part where it really kind of clobbers you over the head with how pressing it is when the AI’s rant says you exercise your right to freedom and this is the result, all rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt, the untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. And then the Rose AI says, everyone withdraws into their own small gated community of afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds leaking whatever truth suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. And all of this is in the design document from the start. Like it’s a big part of like the aim of the story is that you are constantly having your head spun by betrayals and sudden reversals to the point where you can’t really tell fact from fiction. Every character lies and not everything your eyes tell you is the truth. What is real and what is fantasy? Can one tell the truth even while inside a virtual reality is what we call reality the truth. So all there from the start. Ironies aimed at the digital society and gaming culture is what that design document says. But I was curious Rich, because so much of this is fed to you via big lengthy cutscenes right at the end. Some of this stuff is gently embedded throughout. But I was wondering how elegantly you think the themes of this game, the ultimate themes of this game, mesh with the game itself. You seem to like to praise it there, but it still feels like a lot of it is bolted on in the last two hours. I don’t think it’s elegantly woven in, but I was curious about what you made of how those two things coalesce. I will say that you’re literally a skip button away from ignoring the entire message of the game. Yeah, it’s a tough one. I mean, you’re right, it is inelegant, it is lopsided. I think it took Kojima until Metal Gear 5, really, to tell a story elegantly. I think that’s got a lot of tosh in it as well, but it’s much more… He’s got a lighter touch by that point, I think. I actually think Ground Zeroes might be his best work, narratively. Controversial opinion, I guess, but I almost feel when he leaves the player alone as much as possible and lets the themes and the mechanics do the talking, the games are much stronger. And yeah, it’s definitely one of the flaws of Metal Gear 2:. You know, and I’m sorry I keep on calling it Metal Gear 2:, by the way, is that, yes, it has these fantastic themes. At the same time, what do we hate as people who love video games? We hate games that are just constantly taking you out for a boring cutscene or a codec call. And it’s a criminal. You know, this game is a criminal for that. It does it so often, and particularly at the end, where I really think the balance is way off between these massively exciting kind of set pieces. I really love, particularly, the Ray Battle at the end of it, because it’s just like, you know, in the first Metal Gear Solid, it felt like an enormous achievement to face one Metal Gear and somehow come out on top. And in this one, it’s just like, here you go, here’s 40 of them, got a Rocket Launcher, good luck, new kid. So it kind of, oh god, I think it kind of just about gets away with it, because the set pieces between it are so good. I would never disagree with you, though. I think, yeah, just the ratio, just the ratio at the end of the game. There’s so much exposition dumped on you, that I think could probably have been either in optional codec calls or seeded a bit sooner, but it really just, and I guess I can see why he did it, you know, because there are clues that you’re in a simulation, but he doesn’t want to kind of drop the hammer, if you like, kind of too early. But the price of that, of course, is that when he does do it, he’s got to kind of drop the hammer 50 times to make sure you get the message. I think that one strength of the final stretch of this game has is the shift in location. The Arsenal gear area is very unsettling. It’s a very, quite horror infused space to be in. It’s not a nice place to be at all. And obviously it has all these kind of like body part names to all of the different areas. And yeah, you’re being shut out. You go through the digestive system and you come out of the colon. It’s a lot, it’s shitting Raiden out. He didn’t write that in the old design document. Maybe it’s in a separate PDF, Matthew, I don’t know. So yeah, I find that whole sequence is very powerful and the game comes to life again, jolts to life again as you have this final sequence with Snake running down this corridor and you’ve been given the high frequency blade at this point. So I believe in your, you’re a game of peace, Rich. You talked about the significance of the sword as Raiden kind of like discovering his identity away from Snake. You wrote that six years ago, I don’t expect you to remember it, but like, yeah, I was wondering if you had any kind of thoughts on that kind of decision to give Raiden his own sort of like weapon at the end there and how that kind of like last set piece plays out generally. I think it’s an interesting moment because clearly Kojima thinks about everything as being quite symbolic and up until the blade, Raiden is always using Snake’s weapons. Or, you know, the enemy’s weapons. He doesn’t have anything that’s kind of his own and yeah, it’s kind of, it’s almost like Raiden is dealing with the hand-me-downs and I don’t know how important it is. I mean, obviously it would become crucial to the character because, you know, a later game he’s in is built entirely around the blade, but it’s very much like he’s not using, it’s like Solid Snakes, his older brother, but like his parents have finally decided to buy Raiden his own jumper now and he’s not wearing, you know, the kind of hand-me-down. And it’s not just that. What is it that happens to the title? The title screen changes color, I think, when you go back and it’s him rather than Snake. So when you first start the game, it’s Solid Snakes face on the title screen. When you’ve completed the game, the title screen, the color changes from red to blue and it’s Raiden’s face on the title screen now, not Snake’s. So it’s this kind of like, I don’t know, he almost like takes ownership of the game after you’ve beaten it. And I think, you know, the Katana is… The main thing about it for me is that it’s a moment of fantastic catharsis. You know, this is a game about sneaking around, hiding in cardboard boxes when the guard spot you most of the time, you’re running away and hiding. And then suddenly, you are just the kind of… You’re the cyborg ninja, basically. I mean, it’s kind of Metal Gear Wish fulfilment in that sense. You’re going around slicing things to bits, left, right and centre. So it’s… Yeah, it always felt to me like that’s the moment where it’s like, okay, Raiden is this kind of, you know, he’s a snake fanboy. That’s one of the kind of jokes about him, right? He’s Solid Snake’s ultimate fan, just like anyone who bought Metal Gear Solid 2: is. And he spends the whole game wishing he was Solid Snake. And then when he actually gets his own gear, and it’s different from Solid Snake’s, it’s actually pretty fantastic. So I always felt that was kind of like the moment where Raiden wins in a way, or proves himself to the player, proves himself to himself. I don’t know if I’m maybe thinking too much about that. And it’s just really notable to me that that went on to become the weapon that defined the character. Yeah, I think it represents the self-actualizing that happens in his final arc as he decides that he’s going to take control of what he passes on and what he thinks is important. And abandoning the fake foxhound life and career he’s been pursuing and having his entire journey scripted for him by a patriot AI. I mean, the details get muddy, but I think it’s there. The last thing I wanted to ask about Rich was, spoiler alert for Metal Gear Solid 5, but the Phantom Pain arguably does something very similar in terms of how it reflects the player back at them essentially in terms of the playable character being a mirror image of Snake. I was wondering what you make of the… comparing the two, what you kind of think and whether one game does it better than the other. Oh dear. Am I going to regret asking this? No, not at all. It’s very tough with Metal Gear Solid because I do think Metal Gear Solid 5 is kind of Kojima’s masterpiece. I think the fact that people say it’s unfinished when it’s called The Phantom Pain is kind of really funny. And I think in Metal Gear 5 he’s making more of a point about the journey the player and Kojima Productions have been on and using the cyclical and evolving nature of that to return to his pep militaristic themes of the inevitability and futility of conflict, the importance of making your own decisions within that context. It definitely feels like Metal Gear Solid 2: is kind of a dry run at that theme. And I think Metal Gear, you’d almost have to give the gong to Metal Gear 2: just for doing it first, because I agree they’re very similar. I do think they’re different and I do think the bait and switch in Metal Gear 5 is hidden from you until the very, very end, which is kind of a different way of doing it. And I do think it has a kind of… I do think there’s a different point kind of underpinning Metal Gear 5, but yeah, it’s funny really, because Metal Gear 2: is about how these things are doomed to repeat themselves and, you know, as soon as you have a sequel, the expectations inherent in that are so restrictive of what you can actually make with it, which is why he tried to make something, you know, as different as he could. He, Kojima himself said one of the reasons he was attracted to the theme of, you know, Snake and Raiden was that he didn’t want to do another Metal Gear. Now, this would become the case with every Metal Gear Solid from here on out. You know, when he was making Metal Gear Solid 3, this would be my last Metal Gear. When he was making 4, definitely my last Metal Gear. And then, you know, well, I guess Metal Gear 5 really is his last Metal Gear. But Metal Gear Solid 2: was about that succession. You know, it was about here’s what I hand on to you, you know, to the next great Konami director that will take this series forward. And I think Kojima saw his career going in a very different direction after Metal Gear Solid 2:. And this was meant in a way as a farewell. I do think that. I do think Kojima would have liked to walk away from Metal Gear Solid at some point. And I think it was impossible for him to, not because he was being held back or anything. It’s just like, if you’re a creator, right, your company will back you to do one thing for five million or they’ll back you to make Metal Gear Solid 3 and give you 40 million. I think you’re going to make Metal Gear Solid 3. So it’s almost like the Golden Handcuffs, I think, with Kojima. And I think one of the most interesting things about him as a creator is there is this like resentment at the series. You know, like there’s this slight annoyance. And so here we are again, it’s Snake or someone who looks like Snake. I’m going to run you through these beats and add some fourth wall stuff to have a laugh about it. Don’t really want to be here, but I’m not going to make that too explicit. And I think that’s one of the reasons the game is so good is you’ve got this kind of absolute galaxy sized brain who he wants the freedom, he wants the production values, he wants the kind of capacity to hire anyone who wants to make these games. But it has to be a Metal Gear game. And Metal Gear Solid 2: is where you first feel him chafing at that. Very nicely put. Do you have anything you want to add Matthew on top of that? That’s probably quite a daunting place to be jumping. I feel like I haven’t been able to contribute much to part two because I skipped it. I’m not the partner of the podcast, I was obviously here for it. Wrapping up your Forza review in the background. I just feel embarrassed that I… Well, not embarrassed, but you know, maybe the treat of this game is that it is still okay to connect with it on the level of, you know, you can shoot a tranquilizer dart into these nuts and it’s funny. Yeah, it definitely is. And I thought that just playing it today, I was like, oh, what a great little slice of Metal Gear that’s anchor is just going through it. And like, you know, the M9 is just as a gun completely transforms Metal Gear as a series, I think it kind of like it completely gives you a tool that changes the dynamic of how you play it. So I think that’s fair, shooting them in the nuts, Matthew. No, actually, you know, Matthew’s kind of inadvertently, shall we say, probably made the most important point, which is that the reason these games persist is the they’re just amazing places to play around in. And, you know, I think this is the game where the watermelons make their debut. There are bottles everywhere you can shoot. You mentioned the ice buckets you can tip over, and then the ice will come out and then the ice will melt. There’s flower sacks, you can shoot and flower comes out and that will show up like infrared beams and make guards sneeze. Like there’s this one room in a part of the shell which is or it might be the tanker actually, I forget now, where it’s just like filled with everything they’ve got. It’s just like, oh, here’s the storage room. And it’s just got tons of bottles, tons of watermelons, tons of all. Yes, the tanker. And when you when you go in, he makes a guard come in. I don’t know why I’m saying he obviously referring to Kojima. When you go in the first time, a guard will come in and he’ll be like tired. So he leans up against the bed and just kind of goes to sleep. And like, you can sneak out or you can just say, oh, they’ve given me a guard to screw around with, you know, and it’s like, that’s that’s what you do. You know, you knock on the walls, make him walk around, shoot the flower, make him sneeze, you know. And yeah, the the the real, what’s the word for it? It’s kind of childish almost. It’s like testing something to see if it works, testing an interaction. The Metal Gear games have always been brilliant at like responding to that, like thinking ahead of how you might use an item and how you might expect it to react. And I think that goes into like overdrive in in Metal Gear Solid 2:. And it’s one of the most fun things about it. You know, and you’re absolutely right, Matt, is like, you could spend all day talking about like how it predicted Mark Zuckerberg. But fundamentally, just as something in the hands, it’s an enormous pleasure to play. And it’s endlessly rewarding because whenever you think you can do something, you find out that they’ve got there ahead of you and they’ve prepared, you know, the thing that will surprise and delight you. And that’s one of the things that kept me coming back to this series. And it’s the thing that eventually made me adore this series. I mean, I realized today what a sick motherfucker I am when I was like shooting guards in both legs to see what they do while I had them like held up with a gun. And like, that is as much the essence of this game as the fucking Colonel AI losing his shit while you’re naked in a tunnel on Arsenal Gear. You know what I mean? Like it’s, it’s all part of the same thing. So, yes. Oh, we’ve all done it. I mean, in Metal Gear 5, I spent so much of my time just like as soon as I got the big boss blow up dolls that have the voice command on them, I just set up like as many of them as I could have the enemies coming over and kind of run through them, punching them. I don’t know, I don’t know why I find that amusing with the music on, you know, but it’s like so much of the pleasure of these games is the sandbox element, which is in Metal Gear Solid 2:, even though you’d never describe it as a sandbox game. So that seems like a good place to wrap up then, Rich, thank you so much for joining us and talking through Metal Gear with us. If we maybe we’ll do three at some point or the original Metal Gear Solid. I mean, you know, I feel like I feel bad mining you for all of your good Metal Gear takes, but it’s always a pleasure to hear you talk about this. But where can people find you on social media? Oh God, I can’t remember my Twitter handle, because there we are, Rich J Stanton, that’s me. My middle name is James. So Rich James. Rich J Stanton. That’s it. I’m glad I got that wrong. I don’t want any new followers. As Matt rightly pointed out on a previous episode, I used to have another Twitter account and I posted in a great exercise and vanity all of my Rocket League goals. I’m Diamond 3, thanks. But they all had music on them. And there was just this day where I got like 400 copyright strikes at once. There was obviously the music industry just like switched on this bot and it was just like, stay on target. And I got zapped. Twitter would never reinstate my account. So yeah. Well, this is basically what MGS2 is about, Rich. This is the Patriots AI at work here, taking down your Rocket League goals. It knew that stuff was too powerful for the world to see. Exactly. People could find your work on PC Gamer too, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I work for PC Gamer now. I love it. You can find me writing about absolutely everything from Garrus body pillows to Apple versus Epic filings. Gaming. Just such a rich tapestry. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? I’m at MrBazzill Underscore Pesto. No Rocket League goals on mine. Own goals, maybe. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. You can follow the podcast The Back Page Pod. If you’d like to leave us a review on Apple podcasts, we’d appreciate it. No pressure though. Certainly if you’ve got time, it’s fine. We’ll be back next week with an episode about the best games of 2011. Thank you for listening. Bye for now.