Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, a new open world Kojima Productions title, was announced last night by the creator of the series, Hideo Kojima.
The news arrived at event held in celebration of the 25th anniversary of Metal Gear along with word of a Hollywood movie produced by Avid Arad, a social game and loads of new merchandise.
A demo of Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes was shown in the supposedly tweet-free zone (as if), depicting “Snake” doing what “Snake” does best: crawling around a base, avoiding spotlights and stealth killing. The demonstration ended with everyone’s favorite bandana wearing FOXHOUND merc being airlifted out by a helicopter to the sound of Ride of the Valkyries (thanks Famitsu).
Several tweets commenting on the event were deleted, especially those that mentioned the title being an open-world game, but Metal Gear fans are far too thorough to let that kind of information disappear. 8-4 co-founder John Ricciardi took to Twitter saying “Well other ppl talking about it so…next MG shown, and it looks F’ing HOT. Metal Gear: Ground Zeroes #foxengine #mgs25 #openworld #want” before removing the tweet.
Many had expected a reveal of Kojima’s new Fox engine at the event, and fans were hoping for a new Metal Gear Solid reveal. Those present appeared to get what they wanted though it seems nobody from outside the event has uploaded any footage…yet.
One Twitter user, Brad Douglas, reported that the Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes demo was running on a current-gen PC. We’re taking an educated guess here but that could well mean it’s a next-gen title if E3’s PC demos are anything to go by.
A poster at the event showed “Snake” but eagle-eyed fans noticed the strap of his signature eye-patch as well as the Militaires Sans Frontières logo on his arm, which indicates it could actually be Solid Snake’s mentor and genetic father Big Boss.
A piece of artwork was released on Konami’s Metal Gear 25th Anniversary Special Site showing Snake/Big Boss standing in the rain, night vision goggle attached, again with a Militaires Sans Frontières badge clearly showing on his arm. A little later, another image was released on the site, identical to the first but flipped and emblazoned with a typically ambiguous caption: “From “FOX,” two phantoms were born. We’ve flipped it round and included the artwork below for your lovely selves.
Poster from the event.
Artwork released on the Konami Metal Gear 25th Anniversary Special Site.
Flipped image with extra text.
Also present at the event was Marvel founder and Columbia Pictures producer Avi Arad (images over at Famitsu), who was there to discuss news of a Metal Gear Solid movie.
There’s hope yet for the film to be good as he’s been responsible for a number of comic book conversions that have been well-received by a significant number of fans and critics alike. His previous roster includes Spider-Man, it’s sequels and the recent reboot The Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man, X-Men and it’s sequels amongst many others.
Avi Arad expressed a lot of love for Metal Gear and promised that he and Kojima would take their time and “tell the story with all the nuances, ideology, cautionary tales needed”. He seems to be on a bit of a video game to movie conversion binge, having associations with Ghost in the Shell, inFAMOUS, Mass Effect and Uncharted films. In his presentation Arad expressed a love for the genre, stating “For many years I fought to bring comics to theatres—and video games are the comics of today.”
The event also brought news and a trailer of Metal Gear Social Ops, a title built with the increasingly powerful Unity engine, a system that’s currently powering a huge amount of mobile games. The game will be playable at the Tokyo Games Show and is set to release Q3/Q4 in Japan this year.
Social Ops is being developed by mobile gaming giant GREE and will feature card battles and Mother Base development similar to that seen in Peace Walker (thanks Andriasang). The game will apparently let players relive moments from past games from the legendary series. You’ll find a bunch of pictures over at Famitsu and 4Gamer but for now, here’s a little artwork to whet your appetite.
A massive range of new merchandise made specifically to celebrate the 25th anniversary was announced at the show, including a a Revengeance-branded Seiko watch designed by Shinkawa, Swarovski Foxhound iPhone case, t-shirts, hoodies and even underwear!
Several Metal Gear Solid books were shown off with tons of art and history all wrapped up in a unique MGS case. There were also action figures, pins, toys, keychains, lunch boxes, phone straps, hats, and a limited edition soundtrack collection. Phew! I want it all.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance deserves a mention too, which was featured in a trailer with a tiny new addition: a female voice saying “hisashiburi da ne”, or “it’s been a while” (thanks VG247). Now we don’t know who that was and guesses are all over the place but that’s exactly what they want, Kojima thrives on creating intrigue and suspense, and we pander to it, the scoundrel.
Hopefully Konami will release some footage for us to show you soon, until then, we’ll just have to leave you with the knowledge that Raiden took on a Metal Gear RAY unit in a gameplay demo shown after the Revengeance trailer. Awesome.
Published: Aug 30, 2012 09:01 am