Trivia / Metal Gear Solid

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• Alan Smithee: Almost everyone in the English voice cast were credited under pseudonyms due to them not knowing if their work had the Screen Actors Guild's blessing. The only voice actors who used their real names were David Hayter, Doug Stone, and Scott Dolph.^note Hayter was originally credited as "Sean Barker" in the demo, being an Actor Allusion to Hayter's character from Guyver: Dark Hero; he received SAG's blessing in time to get his real name in the game, though he's still credited as Sean Barker in the European manual. Stone, who used stage names for some other works, had previously recorded for video games under his real name, while Dolph was a Konami production staff member who simply provided some extra Genome Soldier lines. When the cast returned to re-record their lines for the Nintendo GameCube remake, The Twin Snakes, they all used their real names thanks to the project having open SAG support.
• Doing It for the Art: Hayter negotiated so that the entire cast of the original game could be reunited to reprise their roles in The Twin Snakes.
• Executive Meddling: A sort of an inverse example for The Twin Snakes. Cutscene director Ryuhei Kitamura originally wanted the remake's cutscenes to be extremely faithful to the ones in the original game, both in chorography and camera angles. Hideo Kojima, however, encouraged him to just forgo faithfulness and instead lean as heavily into his own style as possible, resulting in the comparably more over-the-top action that ended up in the finished product.
• Killer App: This was one of the big ones that helped the PlayStation dethrone Nintendo.
• Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.": Due to No Export for You, players outside Japan first met Colonel Campbell and Master Miller in this game, not Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. The same goes for Meryl Silverburgh, who debuted in Policenauts.
• Newbie Boom: The game's status as a Killer App for the PlayStation also meant that it was the introduction to the Metal Gear series for many Western fans, as the NES port of the first game and Snake's Revenge where pretty much only hazy memories from a previous console generation at this point.
• No Dub for You: Unlike the PS1 original, The Twin Snakes was never dubbed in Japanese, instead shipping out in Japan with subtitled English voice acting.
• No Port For You: While the original MGS has been ported countless times to various platforms during the last two decades, The Twin Snakes has remained a GameCube exclusive.
• The Other Darrin:
  • In The Twin Snakes, Rob Paulsen provided the voice of Gray Fox instead of Greg Eagles. Eagles would reprise his role as Donald Anderson, however.
  • In an interesting case, both Eagles and Paulsen did not reprise their roles for the Digital Graphic Novel. Anderson and Gray Fox were instead voiced by James C. Mathis III and Larc Spies, who respectively voiced these characters' younger selves in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops.
• Playing Against Type: As aforementioned, Rob Paulsen is the Ninja in The Twin Snakes. You know, the guy who voiced Yakko Warner and Pinky? Wouldn't be the first time he's voiced a ninja though. Or the last time either.
• Recursive Import: The Japanese Integral edition has English voice acting and all the other added content from the overseas releases (multiple difficulties, Snake's tuxedo costume), in addition to having its own exclusive content (a sneaking suit for Meryl, a new weapon, new Codec frequencies and a first-person play mode).
• Recycled Script: The game lifts quite a few plot points and set pieces more or less directly from Metal Gear 2 (and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the original Metal Gear), and even has a couple of very similar plot twists. It gets to the point where Metal Gear Solid can sometimes come across as an outright 3D remake of Metal Gear 2. Specific examples include:
  • A puzzle which involves deactivating an electrified floor by destroying its power supply using guided missiles (previously featured in MG1).
  • A boss fight with a rapid-fire weapon-wielding mercenary who is vulnerable to guided missiles (Machine Gun Kid in MG1, Vulcan Raven in MGS1).
  • An anonymous informant who warns Snake over the radio of incoming traps (Snake's Fan in MG2, Deepthroat in MGS1). One of the more notable examples, as both characters turn out to be Gray Fox.
  • One of Snake's contacts turns out to be the enemy commander, who is willingly giving advice to sabotage Snake's mission (Big Boss in MG1, Master Miller/Liquid Snake in MGS1).
  • The first hostage Snake must rescue has a transmitter which pinpoints his location on Snake's radar (Dr. Marv in MG2, Donald Anderson in MGS1). Both turn out to be enemy spies in disguise (Black Ninja in MG2, Decoy Octopus in MGS1).
  • Snake must follow a female accomplice to the women's restroom in order to meet up with her (Gustava Heffner in MG2, Meryl Silverburgh in MGS1).
  • Snake is attacked while riding an elevator by a four man group of Elite Mooks (The Four Horsemen in MG2, the four stealth-camouflaged soldiers in MGS1).
  • Snake ends up challenging Metal Gear's pilot to a fistfight (Gray Fox in MG2, Liquid Snake in MGS1).
  • Both MG2 and MGS1 feature, respectively, a key or keycard which changes shape at different temperatures, which requires backtracking to activate.
  • Both MG2 and MGS1 have a setpiece where an alarm is activated at the bottom of a long stairwell, leading to Snake having to shoot his way through hordes of guards while climbing the stairs.
• 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.
• Sequel Gap: Eight years between Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990) and Metal Gear Solid (1998).
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Hayter has mentioned in an interview that the reason why the dialogue had to be re-recorded for The Twin Snakes was because all the original dialogue was recorded in a house that had been converted into a recording studio. With the GameCube's much improved sound card, the player would have heard the traffic outside.
• 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.
• Stage Names: As aforementioned, because of some ambiguity about union rules regarding video game productions, most of the English cast used pseudonyms for the first game, with only David Hayter, Doug Stone, and Scott Dolph receiving credit under their own names. With later games, this was no longer an issue, so the returning actors' real names are credited in The Twin Snakes.
• Throw It In!: Gray Fox's presence as the Cyborg Ninja, not to mention the entire concept of the Cyborg Ninja, was not originally going to be in the game: Hideo Kojima liked a unrelated sketch Yoji Shinkawa drew so much that he incorporated it into the game.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: It's been rumored that Decoy Octopus was supposed to have a boss fight, but it was scrapped due to hardware limitations of the PlayStation, resulting in the concept for the fight being impossible to achieve. It also been rumored that aspects of the fight were used in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots in the Laughing Octopus fight.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The game originally entered development for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer under the title of Metal Gear 3. Due to the decline of the 3DO, development of the game was moved over to the PlayStation.
  • Otacon's appearance was supposed to be more indicative of a combination of Dennis Nedry and Michael Moore (i.e. an overweight slob with a baseball cap, always eating a chocolate bar). The design used in the final version was pitched in by Shinkawa as a way to rebel against it.
  • Gray Fox wasn't even originally going to be in the game. The Cyborg Ninja was a completely unrelated sketch Shinkawa had drawn in his spare time. As aforementioned, when Kojima first saw the drawing, he was so impressed by the design that he felt it would be a waste to not use it in the game, leading him to rewrite the script and giving Fox a prominent role in the story.
  • Psycho Mantis was originally going to reference games that were developed by other companies as well in the PS1 version. This wasn't included because Kojima couldn't work out any deals with said companies, but it eventually made its way into The Twin Snakes (if only because of the fact that it was published on a Nintendo-owned console, but even then all the games Mantis references are Nintendo titles, with no references to games by other developers).
  • The ability to hide bodies in lockers was planned for this game, but technical limitations meant it had to wait until Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Another feature that had to wait another game to be realized was Solid Snake's bandana tails— files can be found within the game's data that they were intended to be present and animated here, but once again technical limitations forced it to be cut. Both aspects were later incorporated into The Twin Snakes.
  • Single-Attempt Game was an option. Dying would not only kill Snake permanently, but make the game unplayable.
  • Kim Mai Guest was not the first choice to voice Mei Ling since the production team was concerned about having a voice actress who didn't have a lot of acting credits. The first (unknown) voice actress who was considered to voice Mei Ling didn't pass the audition, so Guest was brought in to do the lines.
  • At one point a Game.com port of the game was in development, but all the evidence left are a few screenshots. Whether it would have been a direct adaptation or a Reformulated Game akin to Metal Gear: Ghost Babel is also unknown.
  • Ryuhei Kitamura originally wanted The Twin Snakes to have faithful recreations of the original cutscenes, but Kojima requested that they be made more over-the-top due to his admiration for the former's cinematic style.
  • In this interview with Denis Dyack about The Twin Snakes, he mentioned that if Silicon Knights were given enough time, they could've added MGS2 to the disc.

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