Do you guys remember the subsequent weeks after the announcement of a new Metal Gear and/or press release, new trailer, etc. the forum and fandom would be inundated with wild speculation and fan theories ranging from plausible to outright schizo? This was maybe my favorite part of the whole experience, seeing a new bit of juicy info drop and immediately logging in to see what people were saying, and adding my own (sometimes unfounded) speculation.
Do you remember any prominent fan theories? Any that came true? What is the craziest theory you remember?
I spent a really long time as a teenager convinced that Raiden was somehow Gray Fox’s son, so you can imagine my initial reaction to Raiden’s reveal in MGS4
I saw the title to this and knew it would be a race to post Quiet=Chico, bravo.
I saw a fun theory prior to V’s release that speculated that Skullface was Psycho Mantis’s father and controlled XOF with psychokinesis, commanding them all at once in a pseudo-Guns of the Patriots sort of way. Obviously a retcon that massive and over the top was out of range even for Kojima, but I thought that was really fun because it inadvertently implies that Psycho Mantis doesn’t actually look that way because of the house fire in his youth, he just looks like that.
Hey speaking of, where are we on MG Survive being canon? Like if we go with a Kojima Purist route, of course not, but Konami does consider it canon and whatever comes after Delta, if it is original, will most likely include Survive in the timeline. I hate the idea, but it is funny.
All the parallels they’d drawn around him and Frank Jaeger, I think in my head that made me think they must somehow be related rather than it just being something that Kojima liked to do as a way of linking his storytelling worlds.
For the record, those parallels were:
Both ruthless child soldiers
Both taken under their wing by one of the Snake brothers (Solidus for Raiden, Big Boss for Gray Fox)
Both had horrendous accidents that caused them to be fitted with a cyber ninja exoskeleton
They also both looked very much alike in concept art and otherwise, blonde hair etc.
One of my friends, who i’m choosing not to name. expressed to me that within their community. when they first saw the trailer of Mgs4 was released , his group all theorized it was…wait for it…SOLIDUS! The eyepatch and the gray hair being the big giveaways.
Believe me, in my time on mgsf, serving the community’s cockamamie brain i’ve heard alot of bad ones how about this one.
Vamp is a Demon/vampire! (kojima is such a bad troll)
It’s less a theory more a one time wish and hope. But I was convinced from the off that we weren’t really playing as Big Boss in MGSV and that it would be the Apocalypse Now of videogaming with Big Boss as the Kurtz of the piece. Along the way you would the bosses from Metal Gear 1 and 2 as members of FOXHOUND.
MGS3 kind of references Apocalypse Now (Snake has to find and kill The Boss, a rogue special forces legend deep behind enemy lines), but I wouldn’t mind a more on the nose story that mirrors Apocalypse Now’s. Among my favorite films of all time.
Imagine Big Boss deep in the mountains of Afghanistan cultivating an almost tribal warrior cult with a mixture of hardened Mujahideen fighters and defected Spetsnaz, adorned in wild camouflage schemes and the remains of those they’ve killed. Not the Outer Heaven we know, much more arcane weirdness, strange ideas, and savagery amongst the sun baked rocks.
This is what I’m saying man, we could’ve seen Big Boss go full crazy. Meet the dude we meet in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake just in 3D and all the presentation Kojima could throw at it. We would have had the Darth Vader of videogames.
Do any of you guys rememebr what the big debate was around solid snake’s and Big boss’s eye color differences? i rememeber there was alotttt of bad takes about them not being related etc, because of it!
I don’t specifically but couldn’t you theoretically change eye color if you’re messing around with genetics? What was the extent of Les Enfants Terribles? How much engineering did they do to these guys?
Per Twin Snakes via the wiki;
Further genetic modification was carried out so that one clone would express each of Big Boss’ dominant genes, while the other would express his recessive genes. Because of their respective gene expressions, the twins had a genetic difference of .43%,[4] a small enough difference to fool nearly all DNA identification procedures exempting those that used precisescanning.[5] Because of the mitochondrial DNA inherited from Dr. Clark’s assistant, the clones were also slightly different from Big Boss as well.
So there was some fuckery with the DNA. Sounds like the fact they used Para-medic’s assistant’s egg and Eva as the prime mover could have accounted for the change in eye color too.
I’ve seen some pretty schizo theories that Raiden was a descendant or clone of Raikov and that’s why they look identical.
The wildest theory was that the Soviets/some group wanted to clone Volgin after his death but ended up getting Raikov’s DNA instead. The mother names him “Ivan” (which is the Russian form of John which equals Jack, Raiden’s eventually real name) after his “father” and flees to Liberia when the child is considered a failed project and set to be terminated.
Personally I think Raiden could be a descendant of Raikov. Portable Ops has Raikov join up with Big Boss and assumedly could be messing around in Africa as a mercenary in the 80s when Raiden was born.
