Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is a strange ode to an exiled author

It’s not even been a year since Konami Metal Gear Solid: Master Collectiona compilation that keeps the first five games in the series playable on modern hardware. Such ease of availability is hardly a given, given the broader industry’s disdain for game preservation. But the collection’s technical limitations and lack of modernization have left some fans cynical.

MGS Delta: Snake Eatera reissue of Metal Gear Solid 3is a different approach. “There is a whole new generation of gamers who are not familiar with the Metal gear series,” Konami producer Noriaki Okamura recently told me at a preview event for the game. Bringing the series to this modern audience, he said, was an exercise in “drawing the line of what we should and shouldn’t change to make sure it feels modern, but still nostalgic.”

The changes are mostly cosmetic. Konami’s presentation at the game’s hands-on event in London focused on the fact that 2020s technology can create much-improved facial expressions and foliage; so yeah, Snake scowling through the jungle looks great. The control system has also been updated for modern sensibilities, but the classic system has been preserved for the dedicated or curious.

One mechanical addition is permanent damage. If Snake gets shot, that scar stays with him for the entire game. I’m a fan of the concept, but I didn’t see how far it would go. While playing the game’s opening mission, Virtuous, I’ll admit that my not-so-sly Snake got shot multiple times, but I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary other than the persistent blood stains.

As for what remains the same, Okamura says Konami “absolutely didn’t want to change anything about the story or the world.” He mentions MGS3 one of his favorite games. But it’s not a decision without a bit of defensiveness: when asked why the story still resonates for him personally and for fans in general 20 years later, Okamura didn’t answer directly, but instead emphasized that Konami “recognizes that some of the expressions in the game may be outdated.” The same disclaimer that appears in the Master Collection also appears at the beginning of Delta.

The outdated elements “have been added without modification in order to preserve the historical context in which the game was created and the original vision of the creator,” that disclaimer reads. Okamura also tells me directly that they were left in “out of respect for the original creator.” And to be clear, I have no problem with the decision to keep the story as is, nor with the inclusion of a disclaimer. The repeated references to Metal gear Writer and director Hideo Kojima are, without mentioning him by name, more interesting.

Remakes and remasters happen all the time without the involvement of the original developers, but games in general rarely have the level of intensely perceived authorship of the Metal Gear series. And yet, based on my recollection of the playtest, unlike MGS3, Delta doesn’t call itself “a Hideo Kojima game.” (I tried to clarify this with Konami PR, but they haven’t responded.) That’s fair; hundreds of people worked on it Delta and Hideo Kojima didn’t, directly. (He’s still mentioned multiple times in the opening crawl for the work he did on 3.) Some of the Delta team has actually worked on the Metal Gear series before, including Okamura himself. And yet even Konami can’t escape the mythologization of Kojima, the “creator” — singular — who Delta must respect.

It’s been almost 10 years since Konami closed the original Kojima Productions. Besides the Master Collectionthe only Metal Gear release was Metal Gear survives, which was poorly received and appears to have disappointing sales. Okamura says the lesson Konami learned from that experience is to ask “what do the fans really want, and what should we give them?”

The answer is implicitly that fans want what Kojima and his team have created. And just on that question I think Delta is a great way to give it to them. It’s very close to the original, right down to the voice lines being reused, and where things have changed, the modernization feels tactful. The designers’ goal is to give returning players nostalgia and to have new players make a similar entry into the series with loyalty, and it’s likely to succeed. Adding options like classic controls is also valuable, and this project seems more likely to bring new fans to the series than the Master CollectionHaving both available is generally a ‘best of both worlds’ situation when it comes to game preservation.

Ultimately, Konami’s profit from games made by a studio it shut down is not a benevolent offer passed on unconditionally to the platonic concept of the fan. “What fans want” is a more palatable description than “what people spend money on,” but it’s also an obvious synonym. In the opening of DeltaSnake says he is committed to “the president and the top.” If they are replaced, that is not a problem. “I will follow the will of the leader, regardless of who is in charge.” In the same way, most people probably do not care who benefits from Delta‘s existence.

But in today’s perpetual culture of remakes—the way art is held in IP for the C-suite to endlessly squeeze out, and the sheer cascade of layoffs and studio closures of the past few years—the tension between who created something and who has the right to profit from recreating it is only likely to grow. Given that MGS3 was chosen as a stepping stone to a new generation Metal gear players, first chronologically in the series, this probably won’t be the only time Konami’s developers find themselves in this situation. And in that larger context, how respectful Delta is that that tension will still exist.

Disclosure: This article is based on a preview event held by publisher Konami in London, England on August 12th. Konami provided Polygon with travel and accommodations for the event. Additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.