Trivia / Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

• Acting for Two: Solidus Snake and Solid Snake are both voiced by Akio Ōtsuka in the Japanese version, and they exchange lines during Raiden's first encounter with Solidus.
• Approval of God: While the VR theory was shot down by Hideo Kojima, he included numerous nods of it in Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, particularly "External Gazer": While testing out Otacon's newest toy, a VR helmet, Snake is tricked into believing he's Raiden and starts to experience bizarre scenarios.
• Distanced from Current Events:
  • The game was originally going to be mastered in North America on September 14, 2001. However, due to 9/11, a sequence where Arsenal Gear crashes through Manhattan was severely chopped down. Instead, the game jump-cuts from Arsenal Gear accelerating down the Hudson River with the music swelling dramatically, to it having already reached Federal Hall.
  • A line that also didn't make the cut thanks to 9/11 was one where Raiden claimed that "the U.S. President is a terrorist" at a point after meeting him.
• Dummied Out:
  • Some unused speech and a strange video showing a news report about the displaced Statue of Liberty remain from the post-9/11 removal of the Arsenal Gear/New York collision. Unlike the rest of the things edited out due to 9/11, this never resurfaced anywhere, not even in the novelization.
  • The FAMAS assault rifle from Metal Gear Solid is in the game, but can only be acquired via a GameShark; originally it was to be found in the Tanker Chapter.
• Executive Meddling: Konami execs forced Raiden's name in Japanese to be written using kanji (雷電), instead of katakana (ライデン) like other characters, because ライデン looked a bit too much like a transliteration of "Laden", as in Osama bin Laden.
• Flip-Flop of God: The AI who converses with Raiden at the climax of MGS2 is credited as "JFK", but this was later retconned to John Doe.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Not the game itself, but the skateboarding minigame included in the PlayStation 2 version of Substance. It was not included in the Xbox and PC versions nor the HD and Master Collections.
• Meaningful Release Date: At least one trailer pointed out that the game was released during the Chinese Year of the Snake.
• No Budget: Due to the negative reception the original game got, the developers felt the need to create an alternate mode for the sake of including more content with Snake as a playable character. Snake Tales were written by Tomokazu Fukushima, but the missions have a low budget feel to them as the stages are rehashes of the main game, there's no voice acting nor cutscenes, and new characters who weren't in the main game reuse voice clips (Meryl shares Olga's clips).
• No Dub for You: The demo released with Zone of the Enders came with just the Japanese audio track.
• Self-Adaptation: Double Subverted. The game was adapted as a comic book by Ashley Wood and IDW Publishing. But the comic book adaptation would be turned into a Digital Graphic Novel movie, which would be directed by Hideo Kojima once again.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The Digital Graphic Novel film adaptation of the comic book adaptation was dubbed to English in 2008, but it would not see a release outside of Japan until 2013 as part of The Legacy Collection.
• The Other Darrin: Some actors were unable to reprise their roles for the Digital Graphic Novel film adaptation. Kari Wahlgren voices Rose instead of Lara Cody, James C. Mathis III replaces Greg Eagles as Peter Stillman after doing the same for Donald Anderson in the first one, and Phil LaMarr pulls double duty, replacing Kevin Michael Richardson as Scott Dolph.
• Reality Subtext: "[We should] let our children read our sad and messy history by its light," says Solid Snake. While the game was in production, there was a major controversy about the Japanese government whitewashing World War II atrocities in school textbooks.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2 reveals a variety of cut content from the game. For example, Snake was supposed to plant C4s on RAY (similar to his work with Philanthropy), not just take pictures. This sequence made it into Metal Gear Solid 3 during Naked Snake's sabotage of the Shagohod factory.
  • The Tanker Chapter was intended to end with an escape sequence as Snake tries to make it out of the tanker before it sinks, but the sequence was cut because play testers didn't think it was fun enough. Footage of the cut sequence is still used in the main game itself, in flashbacks.
  • There were supposed to be two additional members of Dead Cell. Old Boy, a hundred-year-old soldier and Big Boss' former mentor, was cut early on, while Chinaman, a Vietnamese swimmer and illusionist, was left in long enough to have a boss fight created for him; when he was cut, his boss arena and several of his abilities were given to Vamp. Chinaman is also still visible in one sequence; he's the dead man being cradled by Fortune in the flashback to Dead Cell's liquidation.
  • As revealed in Yoji Shinkawa's artbook of the game, a young Ed Brown from Policenauts was supposed to be the NYPD bomb squad technician, marking the second instance of direct Canon Welding between the series (the first being Meryl, who also originated from Policenauts before debuting in Metal Gear Solid). He was cut due to the obvious Continuity Snarl where he would be dead before the events of Policenauts, replaced with the original new character Peter Stillman.
  • Originally, there was going to be an unlockable item called the Mantis Mask, which would have allowed Raiden to read the thoughts of NPCs. This sounds suspiciously like it was retooled into the directional microphone, which can be used in several sequences to hear secret messages.
  • Originally, Raiden's privates would have been exposed during combat inside Arsenal Gear, prior to meeting Snake, depending on the player's actions. It would have led to a game over.
  • The scene of Arsenal Gear crashing into Lower Manhattan was cut due to 9/11. It was planned as a pretty brutal sequence, with Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty being toppled like bowling pins. What isn't generally known, though, is that Snake was supposed to join Raiden for the finale, battling Liquid Ocelot and Solidus Snake as a crowd of rooting civilians and mounted policemen look on.
  • According to The Shedding, a Japanese-exclusive behind-the-scenes book as part of the Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater "Extreme Box", the entire game was very nearly cancelled at the last minute, again, due to 9/11. The game had been effectively finished by that point, but Kojima, Konami, and their American legal teams were genuinely afraid of releasing the game out of fear of becoming targeted by real terrorists, as well as by the U.S. government (it was not a friendly time for Japanese Americans criticizing the Bush administration), with Kojima considering retiring from the industry altogether. It took major convincing by Kojima's team and Konami's top brass for the game to continue with its green light, albeit with several necessary modifications, including the aforementioned trimming of the ending.
  • Vamp was originally going to be a woman. Due to the introduction of Fortune, however, Vamp's gender was changed during development. Also, he was originally supposed to be, similar to a real life vampire, afraid of the crucifix, although it was mostly due to the trauma he experienced when the church he was attending in Romania was bombed with him and his family in it, where he actually was impaled by one.
  • The original plan for the plot was for Liquid to have survived the events of Metal Gear Solid and be the Big Bad for this game, with Snake as the protagonist tracking Liquid down in the Middle East after he had stolen some nuclear warheads. It was changed when actual conflict in the Middle East began heating up. Another version of the plot would have revolved entirely around the hijacked tanker, before it was changed to being a prologue for the main game.
  • Pliskin was going to have blond hair, which is why Raiden at first seems suspicious that he is Liquid, and Rose was going to have blond hair in the ending. Both of these got as far as playtesting before being dropped for being too disconnecting.
  • During an appearance on GameCenter CX, Kojima shared a few "unused jokes" that he wrote down wanting to include but didn't for whatever reason:
    • During the intro tanker scene with Snake, there was supposed to be a gag where you have to walk down a hallway, hearing the sounds of "Psycho" Strings gradually building up as you approach the corner... only for it to be a guard idly playing the violin to himself. This was cut as not only would it be a pain to have to animate a character playing the violin just for one joke, but it was apparently too expensive to get a violin for the purpose.
    • The gag of having to avoid a soldier pissing over a ledge and unknowingly over Raiden was originally supposed to go even further, where if you look up, you would see the soldier instead then stick his butt out — making the player think he's about to "blow mud" all over him — but it just results in more pee. Kojima admitted that while he thought it was funny, whenever he'd ask developers to add it in for him, they'd always pretend to be "too busy."
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Metal Gear Solid 2 was intended to close the book on Kojima's involvement with the series, and it shows. Hence the labyrinthine plot Left Hanging, with no intention of ever resolving it. Kojima would walk into the office every day and demand that each developer come up with a new idea, which eventually birthed the bomb disposal sequence.

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