Metal Gear Solid2 For Dummies Ver2.0 - Guide for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty
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T A C T I C A L E S P I O N A G E A C T I O N
M E T A L G E A R S O L I D 2
S O N S O F L I B E R T Y
for dummies
coutoin:this guide is not for wips people the get secard of spoilers
people who fant at the site of blood people who think the goverment
(say hi to the green leprocons that are behind you about to kill you)
is out to get them and people who
pee there pants from fear ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
_____________________________________
name:peter mcdaniel
email:[email protected]
ver:2.5
datefinished:monday november 25 ,2001
time:12:37 am
updated: november 26,2001
time:4:02 pm
updates:added more stuff than ver.1.0
and a new bio of the game and game maker
================
Basic controls
================
Metal Gear Solid is least known for its fluid controls, where wherever you
direct the analog stick, your character will move in that direction. Sick.
D-Pad................................................Move Character/Highliter
Left Analog Stick....................................Move Character/Highliter
Right Analog Stick.......................................Change Camera Angles
Circle Button............................................Punch/Confirm button
Cross Button...............................................Cancel/Crouch/Roll
Triangle Button............................................Main Action Button
Square Button.......................................Shoot/Throw/Strangle/etc.
L1 Button.........................................................Aim/Lock-on
L2 Button............................Open Item inventory/Equip available item
R1 Button...................................................First-Person View
R2 Button.........................................Open Weapons/Equipment menu
SELECT Button...............................................Open Codec screen
START Button............................................Pause game/Help Stuff
===============
System
================
Learn about the basics of Metal Gear Solid 2, and how to get started. I'll
strip each segment down for better comprehension of the game to the fullest
extent. Well...as far as my work ethics will take me, anyway. Details will
_not_ be 150% accurate, or even as close for that matter since I'm a fallible
human (gasp!).
==================
Weapons and info of weps
==================
M9: This is a silenced pistol, that fires tranquilizer darts, with its
current adaptor. It will stun enemies, and it will stun more
effectively if you hit them in the head, or in the stomach/bathing suit
area. . (Fire with square, hold to aim).
The Beretta M-9 (also known as Beretta 92f) Chambered to fire 9mm
bullets. Muzzle velocity 390 meters a second weighs 950 grams or 33
ounces
unloaded. Overall length 9 inches or 217 m, barrel length 5 inches or
125
and magazine capacity is 15 rounds.
Beretta Model 92F Produced in 1985 as the official US Army sidearm.
Fires 9x19mm parabellum. Magazine capacity: 15 rds. Country of origin:
Italy
USP: This is an army pistol, with a fairly large clip as handguns go.
It has a laser sight and a flashlight attached for better shooting.
You can take most any enemy down with 3 shots, but limb shots will not
kill an enemy unless 5 or 6 are used. . (Fire with square, hold to
aim).
The USP is made by H&K in germany and is considered one of the best
combat pistol around, it is available in 9MM, 40S&W,and 45ACP.
Heckler & Koch USP 9 Produced in 1990 for the US (civilian, law
enforcement and military). Fires 9x19mm parabellum, also available in
S&W .40 and later in .45 Magazine capacity: 15 rnds. Country of origin:
Germany USP stands for "Universal Self-loading Pistol"
SOCOM: Special Operations COMmand pistol. This is a great pistol, with
a 12 round clip, with laser sight included. It can be adapted to a
silencer, and it's stopping power is heavy. Basically, it's a .45
that's adapted for all types of situations. (Fire with square, hold to
aim).
Heckler & Koch SOCOM Produced in 1991 for US Special Operations Command
for elite military units (SEALS, Green Beret, Rangers, etc.) Fires .45
ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) Magazine capacity: 13 rnds. SOCOM stands
for Special Operations Command.
Chaff Grenades: These grenades throw out an electric disturbing field
for a small time. All electronics will be frozen, and reset after the
time is done. (Hold square to remove pin, and make range farther as
held longer).
Stun Grenades: These "flashbangs" are used to stun enemies momentarily.
Sight and sound will be unavailable to the targets for about 5 seconds.
(Hold square to remove pin, and make range farther as held longer).
Grenades: These grenades are special made incendiaries. They explode a
flammable gas into a large area, then a spark sets it off. Normal
grenades just launch flying particles of metal, but these are actual
incendiaries. (Hold square to remove pin, and make range farther as
held longer).
M4: This rifle is a fully automatic assault rifle with a 30 round clip.
It has good accuracy, and can fire at a great rate. It is accurate,
and it has a laser sight to boot. (Press square lightly to aim, hard
to auto fire).
M-4 The ancestor of the M-16, it fires 5.56 and has a 30 round clip.
Usually seen with extending stock. Very Reliable and is still used due
to
its reliability by the seal teams
AK-74u: This rifle is used as a disguise to enter Shell 1 core. It is
similar to the M4, but with a shorter barrel, and a bit less accurate.
It's used mainly for short range combat in real life. 30 round clip
with laser sight. (Press square lightly to aim, hard to auto fire).
Here's some real info on the gun from Shotgunner
It is a re-designed version of the the old Russian rifle, the AK-47.
Still firing the same 7.62 mm round the AK-47 used, it boasts higher
accuracy and better tolerance to the elements, due to i's new design.
Caliber: 5.45 x 39 mm Magazine capacity: 30 Year produced: 1974
PSG1: This high powered sniper rifle has a good fire rate, and a long
range, with zoom scope. Use pentazemins while firing. (Use square to
fire, circle to sight in, x to sight out). There is a mod for this gun
which allows the fire of tranquilizer rounds.
The PSG-1 was manufactured by Heckler and Koch and is the worlds first
semi-automatic Sniper Rifle to use a 20 round magazine. It fires
7.62mmx
51mm bullets. It is known for its deadly acurassy. Based on the G-3
using
the Hechler And Koch. Weighs 7.84 Kg with a 5 or 20 round magazine. 47
inches (long 1028 mm), barrel length 650 mm or 26 inches. accuracy - 3
inch
groups with 20 rounds at 300 meters.
The PSG1 is another H&K design, it is .308 caliber and extremely
accurate, one of these on the civilian market costs about $3,000
dollars.
Stinger: This missile launcher fires heat seeking rounds at a target.
They do massive damage, and can take down small jets. (Put the
crosshair on the target, it will turn red. Then press square to fire).
The Stinger isn't actually the launcher but the missiles themselves, the
launchers history is a long one though. The anti-aircraft missile
launcher
was introduced in the 1967 by the Egyptians against the Israelis. The
US
army then modified it to carry first generation homing missiles. later
on
stinger missiles were finally used. The stinger missile is produced by
Hughes and is an "all aspect" SAM. Versions actually detect holes made
by an
aircraft against the ultraviolet background of the sky. The missile
itself
weighs 23lb/10 kg and is about 6 inches/ 152 cm long. The whole shebang
weighs about 34.5 lb/ 15.7 kg. The missile itself rapidly accelerates
to
Mach 2 and then intercepts the unfortunate aircraft.
Nikita: This missile launcher fires guided missiles. Dissimilar to the
first game, these are always in first person mode, for easier steering.
(Press square to fire, and left right on the left stick for direction).
RGB6: This grenade launcher has a 6 round clip, and fires short ranged
grenades. Upon detonation, these grenades spread incendiary gas
through the air, and ignite it instantly, making a fiery explosion.
(fire with square).
The Grenade Launcher (RG8, if I remember correctly) is a rotary-drum
style grenade launcher, much like an MM-1, which is basically the
cousin to the Vietnam-era M-79 "Thumper" Grenade Launcher. The
advantage of the rotary-drum style launchers is the obvious fact of
being able to fire more shots before having to reload.
C4: This explosive will blow holes in walls, and enough of it will
cause large explosions, even enough to knock down a clean up plant.
(plane with square, detonate with circle).
C4 military grade is plastic explosive resembling clay, or wax. It can
me molded, or kept in rectangular prism form, but it takes very little
to cause a lot of damage. It is used to open doors, or destroy most
anything, often good on tanks. It cannot be detonated by heat or
pressure, but only by an electric charge, often from a remote.
Unstable, non military grade C4 is somewhat of a hybrid, and is
affected by heat and pressure.
Claymore Mines: These mines destroy anything in their path with a spray
of shrapnel. These mines use new technology to see if a person is
near. (plant mine with square)
Hyper Blade: Here it is, what we've all been waiting for. It's not as
cool as I'd hoped. It swings with the right analog stick, but it's not
fast enough to really do damage. It looks cool though, and it is one
hit kill.
(Also its called the High Frequency blade not Hyper blade) A blade like
this
would work on the principle of making many small vibrations so with
every
cut it makes many more small incisions (kinda like vibro blades in Star
Wars). A blade like this would probably be made of carbon fibers as to
not
dull at all. This would expplain its one hit kill power.
==========
Sneaking Faq
==========
RunWalk: You can run or walk depending upon how hard you hit the
analog stick. Experiment, because walking makes you far quieter, and
silent on loud floors.
Hug Walls: When pressing up against a wall, you will hug it, so as not
to be seen around corners. You can move along the wall with the analog
stick, or with L2/R2.
Corners: To look around a corner, hug the wall near it, and press
either L2/R2, to peek. If seen, you will be in trouble. You can look
around more while looking around a corner with the R3 stick. Also,
there are 2 types of cornering, and one of them, the more rare one,
happens when you area against a wall with a slight protrusion. You
will just put your head out a bit, and the view will be limited, but
more safe.
Corner Shoot: Get out a weapon (pistol/rifle) and corner. When
peeking, hit square, and you will pop out and fire. You can hold down
fire to fire more, and you can go into first person in this mode.
After firing, you will corner again, so as not to get hit.
Guards(weak points): A head shot or groin shot will kill a guard. A
limb shot will not, but 2 or 3 will. If a guard sees you, shoot him
quickly to stop him from calling back ups.
Radios: If a soldier calls for help, shoot the radio while he's calling
for it to break. Then he has to take you himself, but reinforcements
will come, at a later time. You can also shoot radios, they are the
long black box on the back right hip of the soldiers.
Hold-Ups: You can get a soldier in a hold up by running up behind him
and drawing a bead on them. Snake will say freeze, and they will stop.
You can shoot their radio, them, or run in front of them to get items.
While in front of them, aim at their head or groin to make them shake
items off. The first thing they will shake off is a dog-tag (see
secrets). They will give you other stuff too, if you keep trying.
Some are brave, and will not shake, they tell you to shoot them. Shoot
them in the arm or leg, and then aim at their head, and they will be
more cooperative. You must shoot them with a bullet weapon for this,
not the M9.
Dead/Asleep Guards: Go over a dead or asleep guard, hit square, and you
will pick them up. You can drag them places, or drop them to get
items. Repeatedly dropping them will give you items, and it will wake
them up faster. You can also put them in a locker, if you open it, and
drag them inside.
Melee Fighting: Punching and kicking guards is not lethal, but it will
knock them down, and put them out cold for a short time if you do it
twice.
First Person Mode: You can do this with R1, and it's easier to shoot,
and more realistic.
Cameras: They can be sneaked past, or shot with a bullet weapon.
Shoulder Throw: When going for speed, this throw will quickly drop a
guard. He will get up however, and call for aid, unless you do
something. You can shoot him while he's down. If you do it twice, it
blacks them out.
Stand on your Toes:Hold R2 and L2 and aim with L1 to do it.
Choke Hold/Hostage: You can quietly go up behind a guard and hit square
to choke them. Do it 10 times to break their neck, or drag them around
and hit it again whenever they struggle. If you are being attacked,
guards will not shoot the front of you if you have a guard as a
hostage. They will shoot your behind. *'s and Z's are usually 3, but
they count down as a guard gets ready to awaken.
Roll/Flip: Snake has a roll, Raiden has a flip. The roll is faster,
and it will cover areas quickly and quietly. The flip is not as fast,
and I don't know if it's possible to do (kick, while also doing no
handed cartwheel). It will however cover large gaps, so do it if you
need to jump over something. Don't do it on the stairs, or you will
knock yourself out for a short second.
Running/Firing: You can run and fire at the same time by holding square
and X, and the direction you want to run. Square fires, X makes you
run with your gun. To not fire an assault rifle, just hold square
lightly.
Distractions: You can throw empty ammo clips, or knock on the wall with
circle, as a distraction for guards. There is also a magazine you can
plant on the ground, and guards will take it and look at it. But
remember that if you use it you cannot pick it up again.
Hanging: You can hand off of sides of things with triangle. If you do
it 50 (I think) times, then your grip will level up, and you can hold
on longer. You can drop onto unsuspecting guards to stun them.
Escort: Hold triangle to escort a person by holding their hand.
Swimming: You can swim with circle, pressed rapidly, and the L3 stick.
Stingers: Use stinger missiles by locking on and then firing. You can
shoot around objects by locking on, then jerking the view sideways, and
firing. The lock will stay on, the missile will travel in a curved
path towards the object.
Nikita: Use these missiles with the L3 stick, and guide them through
vents, etc. They will get a burst of speed if you don't move them, so
I advise slightly moving them every half second or so. They also run
out of fuel after a while.
===============
Characters/Codec #s
===============
This will only contain Codec #s
140.85: Hal Emmerich
140.96: Hal Emmerich (to save)
141.80: Pliskin
140.25: Peter
140.48: Deepthroat aka:Mr.x dum dum dum
140.85: Colonel
140.96: Rosemary
141.12: Otacon
141.37 President
141.52 Emma Emmerich
================
sankes words of wistom
================
>shoot a fire extinguisher and the contents will spew out.It's
probably a good way to distract enemies.
>if you shoot those pipes along the ceiling or the floor,jets of
stem will escape.use it to distract or burn the enemy.
>remeber to use the surroundings to your advantage.
>put your themal goggles on and look at the enemy's neck area.you
should be able to see if the guy has a dog tag.
>a full life gauge will slow down the use of 02 and grip
>jump down on a guys head to knock him out :) fun
>go for the enemy's central nervous system (there back your you drop outs)
for a one shot killl.ouch.
>inflict only the damage that is most effective at the time to save ammo
>There are items you can only get by doing a holdup
===============
now for some training
===============
advanced 101:These tips will help you become an expert player,
and aid you in some ofthe more difficult areas of the game.
<1.you'll notice that the enemies you can get dog tags from have
them around there neck and glitter from there chest.simply hold them
up and (if a woman gamer unlike me) hold them up at the crotch or (if a man)
go for there head after you get the tag shot them
<2.shoot (with the 9mm) the lens of a camera to disable it
<3.do a 100 pullups to increase your grab meter so that you will be able to
hold on longer
<4.when trying to collect all of the doggie tags, it helps to knock all
of the guys out frist,then wake them up wit the coolent
(for them to wake up faster) before holding them up
<5.take an enemy hostage using the stranglehold tech and other
soldiers will hesitage to attack you
<6.at anytime you can slowly regain health by simply crouching
down anremaining still.note:this tech will only refill it to green
<7.when a guard is standing up against the railing you can knock him
over the edge with sanks punch kick combo.it is very effective
<8.snake will slowly lose life if you lite up a cigge,but if you let
him puff away for a min or 2 he'll stop useing energy.also it has the
same effect as pentazemin in that it slows down his hart rate and helps
him aim better.finally puffing smoke lets you see thouse pesky laser trip-wires.
<9.if an enemy spots you and you have no chance of of taking him down
before he sends for backup leave the area be for the map turns red and
go back in you'll be safe untill he sees you again
<10.use c4 to unlock the lock doors BAMMM BLASTO BOOOM
==========
now the guide
==========
Mission 1
Outer Deck: After some awesome cg's, and some talk with Otacon,
you are left on the outer front deck. Grab the items under the stairs,
and in the back corners, and head to the bottom floor door on the left.
There is a guard on the top railing who will see you, so stun him with
the M9, and there is another guard on the bottom floor with you, to the
left.
Deck A Crew's Quarters
Get the ration and the M9 bullets from the lockers, and take some
pictures if you like ('o'). There is a guard in the right hallway,
right outside the locker room. Stun him, and run to the end of that
hall.
Deck A Crew's Lounge
Get the stun grenades on the right stairs leading down. That door is
currently locked, but remember it, because you'll be coming back to it.
There are 2 guards in the lounge area. Stun the one in the hall from
the hall you come in from. Then get his friend, when he comes into
view. There's another ration in the lounge area. There's a guard just
waiting to be held up on the left stairs leading down, but he's a hard
nut to crack, and you have to stun him, or he gets feisty. Go to the
door on the right at the top of the stairs.
Deck B Crew's Quarters
There are 2 guards, one on either end of this hall. Just pop around
the corner and stun them. On the bottom section, there is a locker
with USP bullets, but don't worry, cuz you don't get the USP yet.
There is a ration in a niche on the left hall. There are also M9
bullets under the stairs on the right. Go up these stairs.
Deck C Crew's Quarters
There is a camera here. You can't put it out of commission with your
M9, so wait till you get better firepower. Just hug the wall and go
under it. There are chaff grenades in the locker, and a ration in a
vent on the left side. Go up the stairs.
Deck D Crew's Quarters
There are 2 guards on this floor, and a potential for a lot more, so
listen carefully. After you head up the stairs, go to the main
horizontal hallway, and go to the door on the right. Skip the camera
cg, and stun the guard while he's not looking. Then get the ration
from the kitchen, and get the M9 bullets from under the table if you
need them. Then travel around the outside of the room, and go to the
door on the bottom right of the screen. Wait until you know the guy's
not looking, and open it and stun him. Then run up the stairs.
^Optional^ There is a storeroom on this floor with a dry box in it, and
M9 bullets. You can go here to hide out too, but it's not necessary.
Control Room
There are USP bullets here, but you can't get them. There's a short
cg, and then you get to talk to Otacon. Then you head outside.
Upper Outside Deck (Boss)
Okay, here's a boss. To fight this boss there are a few ways to
win. The first is really slow, but works the best for me. Just go to
the little niche in the boxes, and look through, and shoot the boss
comes into view. Strafe left to right while in first person mode to
get a better shot. Also, run away when the grenades come in. Another
method is to strafe while in first person mode from behind a box.
Whichever mode you chose, there are a few things you want to do.
First, shoot both cords holding the tarp down. This will aid you when
"it" hides behind it. Secondly, shoot out the searchlight, as "it"
will use it later.
(EXTREME): Faster and more accurate. Well, to deal with this boss on
extreme, you have to use misdirection. Start out behind one set of
boxes, and run to behind another when the boss isn't looking. Then,
the boss will keep shooting towards the other set of boxes. This is
your chance to shoot, because the boss won't be looking. After doing
this several times, the boss will shoot off the tarp, and it will fly
up to protect the boss. Go to the far left set of boxes, and strafe
out and try to shoot the boss. After one hit, the boss will let the
tarp go, and shoot the searchlight in your eyes. My best strategy is
to go to the little niche in the boxes, and shoot the bosses feet
through it. Make sure you aren't in the bosses range though, and watch
out for grenades. This should do it, so good luck to you all.
Upper Outside Deck (after the fight): There are plenty of items. There
are 2 M9 bullets, the item you get from the fight, and a wet box,
as well as infra-red goggles.
-go back to the Deck A Crew's Lounge, same tactics as above.
Deck A Crew's Lounge
Go to the door at the end of the stairs leading down on the right, and
through the door.
Engine Room
This entire area is categorized as the engine room, so here goes.
There are 3 USP bullets lying around. There are M9 rounds, and a
ration and grenades as well. First, there's a cool shadow and
another thing. Travel through the inner room, hiding from guards,
and stunning them. Once on the other side, there is a room with 3
infra red sensors that you can't pass without disarming. Otacon calls
to tell you how, but he's a bit unclear. The first one is on the top
of a ledge. Stand on a box, and you'll see it. Shoot that. Then,
there's a second one you can see anyway. Make sure to shoot it, not
the c4. Then, the last ones light doesn't show, but it's shape is
visible around the edge of the sensor, as a ramped sort of box thingy.
Anyway, it's on the left. Shoot it. Then go through.
Deck 2 Port
There is a ration here and 4 USP bullets. Go until the end of the
hallway, and try to use the M9, as the other weapon alerts gaurds with
it's flashlight.
Deck 2 Starboard
Here are some cool cg's and you get a sub-boss fight. Shoot all
the gaurds, there are like 9 of them, and go through the door. There's
a ration and 2 USP rounds at the end of the hall.
(EXTREME): Hide behind a box so that you can still see the tops of
their heads and keep shooting.
Hold 1
There are a lot of troops here. The objective is to get through
without being seen. Go down the ladders, and to the left side. Crawl
under the light. Also, crawl a lot of the time, even with the time
limit, because the floors make noise. There are some M9 rounds here.
Hold 2
This is a bit of a puzzle. Just crawl over the floors, or walk slowly
with the analog stick, and move when the soldiers aren't looking. When
back on the right side, wait until the crew does it's exercises, and
they should be looking away. The go through the door.
Hold 3
There "it" is Get the pictures(remeber Otacon likes the swimsut pictures and he
likes the toy and the girl and boy poster :)), there's a marines picture on the
back left and right side. Input the data, and watch the cg's
==========of Mission 1
intermitence:
during this time the capten would like to say please stop smoking and turn off
all ectronic equipment and for the love of god change your under ware*phew
==========
Mission 2
==========
This is the beginning of your time as a new member. He goes in similar
to Snake in Metal Gear Solid 1, and has no weapons. His fighting style
is a bit different, and he won't take off the mask until the elevator
(MGS1). This entire area is designed in the shape of 2 hexagons, that
have six areas each. These are noted A-F. You start in strut A.
Strut A Deep Sea Dock
This is the infiltration point. There is a ration in a locker, and a
small cg. There is a band-aid in a cordoned area, and USP rounds
along with a ration in the vents. You can jump into the water and swim
with circle and the left stick. There are supposed to be infra red
goggles in the water, pretty easy to find. If you can't find them,
they are in the game later too, so don't worry. You are introduced to
you commander, the Colonel, who is actually Colonel Campbell from the
first MGS.
(Very Easy): on very easy the M9 is on top of some boxes in this room.
Strut A Pump Facility (mid-level)
There are some downed guards here and a computer. Use the computer,
and you will get a radar. These computers are blue dots on your map,
so use them whenever you get to a new area. You have to hide (similar
to MGS1) from the guards until the elevator arrives.
Strut A Outdoor Deck
There's a bandage, M9 bullets, and Chaff grenades that you get later,
along with a lot of bird droppings, that cause you to slip. The
opening is in a ripped fence on the mid left, and you crawl through it.
Strut A 1st Floor
There are SOCOM bullets in a locker, along with a ration. There are M9
bullets on the floor, and box 1. Evade the guard, and use the computer
to get a radar. If you try to exit right, you see a CYPHER, and you
can't leave until you get some chaff, or a gun, because real bullets
can down a CYPHER, one to the camera, or 3 to the ring. If you try to
exit left, there are guards, but they are doable.
AB Bridge
There are 2 guards, one on either side. Just go on the top path, and
when he's looking away, choke him.
Strut B 1st Floor
There's gratuitous blood here, but strangely enough, it's not the
ninja!!! (from MGS1, similar occurrence). Anyway, you
meet here, and you get a new weapon There is a ration in
a transfomer box on the wall, and there are M9 bullets. There's a comp
on the side area. You will get the SOCOM pistol here.
(Very Easy): on very easy the SOCOM suppressor is in this room too.
BC Bridge
There is a cool cg here, and some chaff grenades . Later on,
there is one guard, and a CYPHER here.
C Strut
This is a sort of lobby area. In the kitchen, you'll find Peter
Stillman . He will charge you with a new quest, to find C4. You
get the Ion Sensor in this area, from Pete. It's called sensor A in
your items. It highlights bombs with green light. You also get a bomb
diffuser, a coolant. He also gives you your first keycard, the level
one keycard. The locations are Disarm the bomb on this strut,
and proceed to the CD Bridge. There is a computer in the room with
Stillman.
CD Bridge
This area has 2 guards as well. Just be careful to skirt them as you
go along.
D Strut
This is a circular strut with 2 floors, and 3 guards, with a lot of
items. Disarm the bomb here, and head off to the DE bridge.
There is a computer on the bottom floor.
(EXTREME): there are 2 more bombs on extreme, one under another
trapdoor, and one on the bottom side of a top walkway.
DE Bridge
There are 3 CYPHERs here.
E Strut
This is a large packaging area. There is a box 5 with the ZOE logo on
it, and ammo for the M4, stun grenades, a mine detector on the bottom
floor, and a computer. Disarm the bomb on this strut and move
on. There is apparently a way to ride the conveyor, just get up on the
ledge with box 5 and the belt will stop. Get on in a box and ride, to
another room. Sounds good to me, but I can't verify it yet. (thanks
snookie).
(EXTREME): on extreme mode, there is also a bomb on a box. This is a
pain to do, because it keeps moving. Just find it by listening for the
beeps, and follow it and try to freeze it.
EF Bridge
There are 3 CYPHER bots here. There is also AK-74u ammo, useless for
now. There are mines on this bridge the first time you go across, so
be careful, and use the mine detector. Also, wait until the look out
is not looking at the field. You get an interesting call here (*17).
F Strut
This strut is a giant storage area, with 2 floors. Just make sure not
to let the guards on the top floor see you. My recommendation is to go
up and deal with them first. The M9 is in a room on the top floor,
with a lv1 card needed for entry. There is also box 2
here.Tranquilize, or kill them. Disarm the bomb in this area by
dropping down from the top level. (*16). There is a suppressor for
the SOCOM on this strut in a side room behind some boxes. In order to
get it, go to the room with the node, and crawl to the other room,
through the secret crawl space. Drop from the top level to get it, and
the dirty magazine, and it sometimes reappears for more.
FA Bridge
This bridge has 3 CYPHERs on it, and some chaff grenades.
A Strut (again)
This time you have a bomb to defuse. You can get it by crawling under
the pipes in the alternate room. To get to it, crawl up from the
second set of little metal stairs. Then crawl left, under two pipes,
and crawl under the third pipe, but not past it. Crawl down, under
that 3rd pipe, and then to the right, and that's where the bomb is.
Then you will get a message from Pete. Then, go get the next bomb,
which is in the room where you started, the deep-sea entrance. Go to
strut B for the last bomb.
(EXTREME): there is a bomb here on the top deck, behind a fence, to the
bottom right of the map. Look through the fence and spray it.
Strut B (again)
Here, the bomb is on a wall, behind the open transformer box. Close
the door, and diffuse the bomb. You will get a call from Pete now
Strut C (again)
Here, Pete has left, so go into the store room for the B sensor
(auditory). Go to the strut A upper deck.
Strut A Upper Level
Use the elevator here to go down. Hit triangle while on it, and if
that doesn't work, go against hits back wall and hit triangle. On the
elevator ride down, you will get a call from Pete
Strut A Deep Sea Entrance (Boss)
The bomb is here. You have to use the sensor B to find it. You have
to crouch near the pool to see it, under the sub, then spray it.
(EXTREME): on extreme the bomb is on the left wall, near the top
top of some stuff. After that, you will get into a messy boss fight
. After this, go in for a transmission from the colonel. Travel
to the strut E heli-pad where the last bomb was. Beware, there are now
mines planted on the Strut A roof.
(EXTREME): Run back and forth like a crazy wiener dog and do the flip
whenever the boss gets the laser on you. The boss will fire twice in
quick succession, so stay moving. Also, don't try to hide, because
with the insane fire rate, the boss clears the room in just a few
seconds.
Strut E (Boss)
Here, we have a boss . There are plenty of items around to use.
The strategy is to go around diffusing the bombs, then shoot the boss
in the head. Here's how: the boss will lay 2 or 3 bombs. Use the A
sensor and the coolant to freeze the bombs. Then, after freezing them,
the boss will go on a short trigger happy rampage. Plant claymores and
use punch/kick combos to knock the boss down. When down, shoot the
bosses head. Try for another shot as the boss gets up. Soon the fight
will be over. The locations of bombs will be on the sides, underside,
or top side of crates, or on barrels or small crates. After this
fight, you will meet another strange person. You will get army
BDU, but you need a gun, the AK-74u. Go to strut F for the gun. This
person also gives you the level 2 keycard, and a cell phone.
(EXTREME): to kill this boss on extreme is hard, extremely hard,
because he begins planting 5 bombs and giving you 20 seconds to clear
them. This is near impossible. The strategy is not what it was for
any other mode. You need to have either a lot of bullets, or infinite
bullets (see secrets) and just run after him with the gun, shooting.
Do this, and he won't be able to plant anymore bombs. Do this until he
dies. It is hard but possible. Also, after this fight there is one
more guard with new tags on each connecting bridge.
Strut F (again)
The gun you seek is behind the level 2 door, on the bottom floor. On
the top floor, another level 2 door allows you access to the M4,
another rifle. Now head to the EF bridge.
(Very Easy): on very easy the AK suppressor is also in the room with
it.
EF Bridge (again)
Take out the CYPHERs and run across the bridge. It will fall out from
beneath you, so run fast. Enter the core.
Shell 1 Core 1st floor
You can walk around this area unhindered with your new outfit. There
are some items laying around. After exploring, go to the elevator at
the top of the map. (There's a comp in this area for radar). There's
also box 4 in this area.
Shell 1 Core B2
This area has the D. Mic. Just get it, and don't touch any other
guards, or else your camo comes off.
Shell 1 Core B1
Here, you need a retina scan. Don't worry about it until you get the
D. Mic. After you have the D. Mic, drag a conscious guard to the eye
scan, and face him towards it, then drop him. He will scan for you.
Go in, and use your D. Mic to find your person, Ames. Ames has a
pacemaker that beeps. Just go around, and when the guards not
checking, check their heart. For me, it was the guy at the bottom
middle. He/she'll give you the next cardkey, level 3. Then listen to
the conversation after which Ocelot comes into the room. Simply
take out the correct gun, and watch the cg. After leaving the
room, the alarm will be on, so shoot your way out. After that, return
to EF bridge.
EF Bridge
The bridge is gone now, but you can use the edge to sneak along the
wall across the bridge. Just make sure any CYPHERs are down. Go to F
strut.
F Strut (again)
Here, you are picking up the PSG1, a sniper rifle. It's behind a level
3 door. Go to strut D after. After getting the PSG-1, crawl in the
secret vent to a PSG1-T. Also, you can get C4 and a RGB6 grenade
launcher here. It's behind more lv3 doors.
D Strut
There is a door here that is level 3 that will open for you. It leads
to shell 2.
DL Bridge
There is somewhat of a puzzle here. You have to disarm the Semtex
bombs, by shooting the green control panels. There are 10 of them.
Call Pliskin for help if you need it. There are 2 right in front of
you when you come in, on the left side of the bridge. Shoot them with
the SOCOM. Use the PSG1 for the rest. There is one clearly visible on
the front of the pipe. There are 2, one on either side of the door
opposite you. There is one on a low ledge on the right, with a lot of
seagulls around it. There is one on the CYPHER flying above the door.
Don't shoot the CYPHER, or it will explode. There is one above the
door that you enter through, and there is one behind the center of the
flag. There is one you can see with the corner of your eye with the
scope on the left at the end of the bridge. I have heard that on hard
there are 12, and this is probable because there are only 8 on easy.
The 2 new bombs are on the lower level, look over the edge to see it,
and below the right balcony.
(EXTREME): There is another CYPHER with a bomb on it, there's a bomb on
the right of the staircase banister, (maybe on hard too), one is under
the stairs you come in on, and it's really hard to hit so use the tippey toey
move to get it from the side
DL Oil Processing Plant (Boss)
You are now accosted by a boss. He and his counterpart attack
you with the Harrier. You immediately get the Stinger, and 10 rounds.
Stay near the second floor stairs, and keep shooting rockets at the
Harrier. It will soon fly overhead for a beating. Shoot it as many
times as you can in this time. Then it will shoot bombs and missiles
at you. Whatever it shoots, go to the second level, and they will not
hit you. If it is missiles, sometimes you have to roll out of the way.
Go back up after each attack, and commence your attack. Soon the
Harrier will fall. Now you get some great spoilers. After the
fight, there is a suppressor for the AK-74u in this area. To get it,
drop to the pipe, and go to the bird crap area, and flip over to the
stair area. This leads up to a fire, that you use the coolant to stop,
and get the suppressor. This is a very efficient upgrade.
DL Oil Processing Plant
Go to the gray rail, and hang off of it. Go until the orange pipe is
beneath you, and drop on. There is a ration at the bottom end, and the
top end leads to a walkway. Climb up to it, and try not to get seen by
the 2 guards. Stun them if need be. Then keep going.
KL Bridge
There are 2 guards in the window, and if you crawl or crouch sneak
along the wall, they won't see you. If they do, they'll call CYPHER.
Also watch out for holes in the walkway. Get rid of all the CYPHERs,
and cross into Shell 2. You will have to do a running flip jump to get
across the descending stairs that are gone.
Shell 2 Core 1st floor
Listen to the conversation, and then go downstairs with the elevator.
There's a RGB6 grenade launcher in this area.
Shell 2 Core B1
This level is flooded, but the Nikita is simply at the end of the hall.
Get it, and go back to the first floor.
Shell 2 Core 1st floor (again)
Stand on the crate, and fire the Nikita into the top slot. Turn right,
then the next right, and you should come out with the president. Now
head for the red light box, and blow it up. Now the electricity is
gone, and you get to visit the pres. He tells you a lot of info
and something startling happens. You get the level 4 card from the
pres. Leave this area, and head down to the B1.
Shell 2 B1 (again)
Go underwater, and go to the first right this time, and then to the end
of the hall. Then go left, and take the next left. Then follow this
path until the end (the N.V.G. are at the first left), and it's the
wheel on the right. Open it, and use an airhole (white dots on map) if
you need it. Then go through the mesh, past the and to the end
wheel. The path through the mesh is to the top left, which leads to
the bottom right. There is also a new weapon, the PSG1 tranquilizer
here, in one of the breathing (white) spots on the map, in the rubble
area.
Shell 2 Water Filtration Chamber 2 (Boss)
Here is a boss, and a hard one at that. You'll need a few
weapons for this. The boss will start out on the water (note: you
cannot get out of that water, it's instant death) and you can shoot him
once. Then he will go down. He will jump back up and hold a pose.
Shoot him. He will then spin, while shooting at you. When he stops,
shoot him again. Then he will go into the water, and come back up on a
top ledge. Shoot him, but never use the L1 to lock on method, this
will not work. A good idea is to use the grenade launcher when he
comes up to hold the lower pose. Also, after sufficient damage, he
will charge you, and appear behind you. As far as I can tell, this is
unstoppable. The charge will just change sides if you shoot him, and
he will appear behind you if you try to hit him. He is faster than you
too, so you cannot run. It is considerable damage, so heal, and hope
it doesn't happen again. When near dead, he will not go into the water
again, but will remain up, shooting things at you. Use the assault
rifles, and stop the shot items. The stinger is also a great weapon in
this fight. You should be the winner after a hard fought battle.
Another method is to hurt him while he's under water. Any grenades or
grenade launcher rounds put into the water while he's down there will
run his air out quickly , which in turn makes him start to drown
quickly. Just throw grenades down every time he goes under. Yet
another solution, by Snookie240, is to punch punch kick him, and this
will put him down quickly, because it drops his knock out bar
drastically. Apparently 4 of these combos should do it.
Shell 2 Water Filtration Chamber 3
Here is a small path underwater. Go right, then left, then left. You
will end up in another area with a computer. Open all the lockers for
a surprise. Take your escort out, and back through the
underwater path. There is body armor under water in this area, so try
to get it. It is very useful against the remaining bosses. Also, if
you didn't get them before, the infra red goggles are in a locker here.
Apparently Konami puts a lot of "Easter Island" statues in their games,
and there is one in here. It's in the corner on a desk or something.
(I never would have noticed. Thanks to Jeremy Emerson for the info).
Water Filtration Chamber 2
There are mines, so pick them up before escorting your person through.
Water Filtration Chamber 1
This is a hard swim, but use a lot of air holes, and use the map. From
where you enter, go right, into the rubble area, then go low, then
high, through the rubble. Take a left at the end of the rubble area,
then take right, then another right, then a left, then 2 more lefts up
the stairs. Vulcan Raven is supposed to be in this area, floating (the
toy).
Shell 2 B1
Use the coolant to scare the bugs away, and go up.
Shell 2 Core floor 1
There are 2 guards to start with, and a third gets off the lift. Use
the M9 to stun them. There's a ration and a pentazemin along with AK
bullets laying around.
KL Bridge
Use the coolant to put out the fire, then go through the door, with the
level 5 card the escort has.
Strut L
Use the wheel to get through, and there are 2 guards on a walkway to
shoot.
KL Oil Fence
Here, your escort leaves to cross the fence. You have to protect her.
You can call Pliskin for help, but I think this may damage the outcome.
Use the PSG1, with a pentazemin, and shoot the mines first, then the
men, then the CYPHER. When you have free time, get the bullets. Then,
in a sudden turn of events, another force comes into play, and you have
to snipe him . Get a bead on his head, and just let fly non
stop. I got a good bead, and never hurt the escort.
(Very Easy): on very easy there are no mines.
Strut E (again...)
With the level 5 card, you can get the Digital camera here, from a room
at the bottom of the stairs. Then go to the EF bridge, and into B2 of
Shell 1. Watch out, there are mines in Shell 1 first floor.
Shell 1 Core B2
The situation is not good. You get briefed to go with another
member. You are then captured .
Torture (Arsenal Gear)
You are tortured for a brief second. Just jam on the triangle button.
That' it. Then you are set free, and a lot of the plot is explained.
Leave this room (look familiar?).
There is a ration in here, along with medicine, if you catch a cold.
Arsenal Gear: Aoyana Ni Chome
You are nude here, and it's hard getting around. There are 5 guards in
your way, and here's how to get around them. To add to the fun, the
colonel has gone quite mad, and transmits funny messages every once in
awhile. There is a box to hide in, and another medicine, but I
couldn't find the box, so here's how to navigate this area without one.
1st guard, wait until he is facing the left wall, away from you, and run
behind him, to a hide out before the second guard. Then crawl by the
low walls past the second guard. Then wait until the 3rd guard is
looking the other way, and run up the stairs. The go to the 2nd bridge,
not the first, and hide behind the little wall, until the guard is
looking the other way, and crawl across the bridge. The guard may bet
you on the corner of his vision a couple times, but he will never keep
you there if you are fast. Then go under the camera, and wait until
the 5th guard is in the long hallway. Go to the top small block, and
hide behind it until the 5th guard goes the other way, and run to the
door.
Arsenal Gear: Ascending Colon
Here, answer phone calls until Rose calls. The Colonel will say a lot
of funny things, and then Rose will finally call, and you will get a
short cg. She will say something, and then you will get your
equipment, and a sword. You meet an old ally, and you get a trace on
the Colonel. You use it with the right analog stick to swing the
blade.
Arsenal Gear: Upper Colon
Here you get to fight a lot. Just stay behind boxes, and shoot a lot.
Arsenal Gear: Sigmoid Colon
I found this part fun, but if you want to do it easily, use the rifles.
Here you get a bust out time, and it's a lot of fun.
Arsenal Gear: Center
Here you get into a fight with a repeat character and your other
member leaves you.
Arsenal Gear: Top (Boss)
Here you meet and you are faced with a big fight. The
strategy is to use the stinger to hit them in the head, or hit them in
the knee, then in the face. Once one of them jumps into the middle,
Stinger ammo, and a ration in the middle, will start appearing.
Dodging the attacks is easy. The machine gun fire, either block with
your sword, run out of the way, or do a flip out of the way. The
falling rockets can be run and flipped away from. The laser, just
don't get close, or just run from it. The biggest danger is the heat
seeking ground hugging missiles. When these come at you, flip out of
the way. After killing 4-7 of them (depending upon hardness level I
think, I'll verify later) yet another interesting cg takes place.
Roof of Building (Boss)
Here you get more info and finally a fight. You get to use your
sword, so you need to be fairly proficient with it. Remember that you
can fall off of the roof here, but on normal I found that he catches
himself. I'm pretty sure that similar to MGS1, that if you are on
Extreme, or maybe even hard, you will not catch yourself, but fall to
your doom. I find that the horizontal slashes repeatedly are the
fastest and most effective. If at a long range, just hit the R3
button, and the jab has a great range, but slow recovery time. The
fighting style is hit and run. Go in, knock him down, run away. If he
strangles you, press triangle repeatedly. Dodge the missiles, and stay
far away when he does the long range sweeps. Also, try to get out of
the way of his power strikes, because they do massive damage. There is
a ration (on normal at least) at the top edge of the building. Then,
in the second stage, he blasts around, lighting the screen on fire.
Dodge the blasts, or block them with your sword (L1), and try not to
catch on fire (if you do, just roll around till it goes out) and keep
up the previous strategy. The game will end, and you'll get some great
Cgs,along with some not so great ones.
well well well you compleated metal gear soild 2 now give your self a hug and
change your under garments(thank you)
=====================
some Fun Quirks & Secrets
=====================
heck i ain't tell you jack brabbit....well ok just afew but that all......don't
give me thouse puppy dog eyes
/DG.CAMERA/ To get the digital camera, simply beat the game. I'm pretty sure
this is the way to get it. You get it in both the Tanker and Plant Chapter,
and you can save your pictures to your memory card.
/RAIDEN OPENING SCREEN/ Once you beat the game, instead of the red picture of
Snake being on the opening screen, a blue Raiden will be there. Pretty neat.
/CODEC FUN/ To zoom in on the character portraits in the character screen,
press L3 and R3 (L3 = pushing the left analog stick, R3 = pushing the right
analog stick). You can also move around the character portraits by moving
around the left and right analog sticks.
/JAPANESE MODELS/ Ever notice the posters of the Japanese models in the Tanker
Chapter in the Deck-A crew's quarters? Well, if you open the far left-back
locker and the far right-front locker, you will see two of these posters. If
you go inside one of the lockers where the posters are, you can press L1 to
lean foward, and you can actually hear Snake smootching them. If you lean
against the far left-back locker while it is open and you have a weapon
equipped, then tap it by pressing the circle (O) button, you will here a boing
sound when you tap the breats! Then unequip your weapon, and tap the "lower
region" of the poster, and get ready for something very, very funny. Note:
you might want to take out all of the guards in this area before you tap the
lower region, for saftey precautions.
/CINEMA FUN/ To pan in during the cinema's, simply press the L1 button. But
don't have to much fun with Olga's armpits, now!
/PLESSKEN/ Snake gives Raiden the name Pliskin for his SEAL identity. The
main character of John Carpenter's Escape from New York/Escape from Los Angeles
movies is... Snake Plessken, same pronounciation.
/WATCH IT KID/ After you get the SOCOM from Pliskin and the scenes are over,
he should be sleeping. If you aim the M9 or SOCOM at him, he will get mad at
you and start saying stuff like "What are you trying to pull?" He will still
say that phrase even after you shoot him in the head with the M9.
Blue Title Screen - After beating the game, the title screen will be blue and
have a picture of Raiden instead of Snake.
Flash - After beating the game, pressing L2 will make a sound and the screen
will flash.
D. Camera - Get this in Strut E Parcel Room right after Emma gets stabbed by
Vamp. When you beat the game, save, and start a new game from that save, you
will have the Digital Camera. See item section for details.
Brown Wig - After beating the game with 50 dog tags, you will start out with
the brown wig. See item section for details.
Orange Wig - After beating the game with 150 dog tags, you will start out with
the orange wig. See item section for details.
Blue Wig - After beating the game with all the dog tags, you will start out
with the blue wig. See item section for details.
Stealth - After beating the game with 100 dog tags, you will start out with the
stealth. See item section for details.
Shaver - Give this to Pliskin, he will shave his facial hair. See item section
for details.
Misplaced Pants - When playing a clear game, in the room with Metal Gear, the
Marines (excepting the colonel) will all be wearing boxers. And no pants over
them.
Ocelot - When in the room with Metal Gear RAY, go into the ventilation shaft,
go behind Metal Gear, and you will be able to see Revolver Ocelot.
Monster - After defeating Olga (boss), shoot her body with a tranquilizer.
Otacon will call you.
=============
gameshark codes
=============
(M) Must Be On EC8783B414483424
Infinite M9 Ammo - Tanker Level 4C89EE121456E788
Infinite USP Ammo - Tanker Level 4C89EE181456E788
Infinite Chaff Grenades - Tanker Level 4C89F1281456E788
Infinite Stun Grenades - Tanker Level 4C89F1261456E788
Infinite Rations - Tanker Level 4C89F1A21456E788
Infinite Bandages - Tanker Level 4C89F1AC1456E788
Have Therm Goggles - Tanker Level 4C89F1BA1456E7A6
Have DG. Camera - Tanker Level 4C89F1BE1456E7A6
Have Body Armor - Tanker Level 4C89F1AE1456E7A6
Have Bandana - Tanker Level 4C89F1E41456E7A6
Infinite Magazines - Tanker Level 4C89F1341456E788
Infinite Grenades - Tanker Level 4C89F1321456E788
Have Stealth - Tanker Level 4C89F1B41456E7A6
Infinite M9 Ammo - Plant Level 4C89F0621456E788
Infinite SOCOM Ammo - Plant Level 4C89F0661456E788
Infinite PSG1 Ammo - Plant Level 4C89F06C1456E788
Infinite RGB6 Ammo - Plant Level 4C89F06A1456E788
Infinite Nikita Ammo - Plant Level 4C89F0701456E788
Infinite Stinger Ammo - Plant Level 4C89F06E1456E788
Infinite C4 - Plant Level 4C89F0721456E788
Infinite Claymores - Plant Level 4C89F0741456E788
Infinite Chaff Grenades - Plant Level 4C89F0781456E788
Infinite Stun Grenades - Plant Level 4C89F0761456E7B1
Infininte AKS-74U Ammo - Plant Level 4C89F07E1456E70C
Infinite Magazines - Plant Level 4C89F0841456E788
Infinite Grenades - Plant Level 4C89F0821456E7B1
Infinite M4 Ammo - Plant Level 4C89F0881456E70C
Infinite PSG1-T Ammo - Plant Level 4C89F0861456E788
Microphone2-Plant 4C89F08C1456E7A6
Book-Plant 4C89F08A1456E7A6
Infinite Rations - Plant Level 3C89F0F21456E788
Pentazemin-Plant 4C89F0FA1456E7A6
Have AK Supressor - Plant Level 4C89F3301456E7A6
1st Pullup Increases Grip to Level 2 - Plant Level 0C89EEE81436E788
4C89EEE81456E788
1st Pullup Increases Grip to Level 2 - Tanker Level 0C89EEE21436E788
4C89EEE21456E788
2nd Pullup Increases Grip to Level 3 - Plant Level 0C89EEE81426E788
0C89EEE81436E7E4 4C89EEE81456E7E4
2nd Pullup Increases Grip to Level 3 - Tanker Level 0C89EEE21426E788
0C89EEE21436E7E4 4C89EEE21456E7E4
Have BDU - Plant Level 4C89F0001456E7A6
Have Bandana - Plant Level 4C89F3341456E7A6
Have Body Armor - Plant Level 4C89F0FE1456E7A6
Have Cigs - Plant Level 4C89F0121456E7A6
Have DG. Camera - Plant Level 4C89F00E1456E7A6
Have MO Disc - Plant Level 4C89F3381456E7A6
Have Medicine - Plant Level 4C89F0F61456E7A6
Have Mine Detector - Plant Level 4C89F0021456E7A6
Have NVG - Plant Level 4C89F00C1456E7A6
Have Phone - Plant Level 4C89F01C1456E7A6
Have SCM Supressor - Plant Level 4C89F32A1456E7A6
Have Scope - Plant Level 4C89F0F81456E7A6
Have Sensor A - Plant Level 4C89F0081456E7A6
Have Sensor B - Plant Level 4C89F0061456E7A6
Have Shaver - Plant Level 4C89F0161456E7A6
Have Stealth - Plant Level 4C89F0041456E7A6
Have Therm G. - Plant Level 4C89F00A1456E7A6
Infinite Bandages - Plant Level 3C89F0FC1456E788
Infinite Pentazemin - Tanker Level 4C89F1AA1456E788
Max AKS-74U Ammo - Plant Level 3C89F0C61456E70C
Max Bandages - Plant Level 3C89F35C1456E788
Max Bandages - Tanker Level 3C89F10C1456E788
Max C4 - Plant Level 3C89F0BA1456E788
Max Chaff Grenades - Plant Level 3C89F0C01456E788
Max Chaff Grenades - Tanker Level 3C89F1701456E788
Max Claymores - Plant Level 3C89F0BC1456E788
Max Grenades - Plant Level 3C89F0CA1456E788
Max Grenades - Tanker Level 3C89F17A1456E788
Max M4 Ammo - Plant Level 3C89F0D01456E70C
Max M9 Ammo - Plant Level 3C89F0AA1456E788
Max M9 Ammo - Tanker Level 3C89F15A1456E788
Max Magazines - Plant Level 3C89F0CC1456E788
Max Magazines - Tanker Level 3C89F17C1456E788
Max Nikita Ammo - Plant Level 3C89F0B81456E788
Max PSG-1 Ammo - Plant Level 3C89F0CE1456E788
Max PSG1 Ammo - Plant Level 3C89F0B41456E788
Max Pentazemin - Tanker Level 3C89F10A1456E788
Max RGB6 Ammo - Plant Level 3C89F0B21456E788
Max Rations - Plant Level 3C89F3521456E788
Max Rations - Tanker Level 3C89F1021456E788
Max SOCOM Ammo - Plant Level 3C89F0AE1456E788
Max Stinger Ammo - Plant Level 3C89F0B61456E788
Max Stun Grenades - Plant Level 3C89F0BE1456E788
Max Stun Grenades - Tanker Level 3C89F16E1456E788
Max USP Ammo - Tanker Level 3C89F1601456E788
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bio
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Growing up in Kobe, Japan, Hideo Kojima, 38, was just like any young boy looking
for fun in an era when video games didn't yet exist. "When I was a young boy, I
enjoyed games like cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, kick the can, and hide-
and-go-seek," Kojima says as he sits in his 6th-floor office at Konami Computer
Entertainment Japan in the Ebisu district of Tokyo. "When I would play hide-and-
go-seek, I remember flattening myself against the wall and looking around the
corner to see if anyone was there," he admits with a laugh, followed by a light
cough.
The mix of Kojima's laughter and coughing is a telling juxtaposition that
represents both the joy and hardship he has been through these past three years--
a thousand days of work that will hopefully culminate tonight, September 28,
2001, with the production of a final version of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of
Liberty, the most anticipated PlayStation 2 game of the year and the follow-up to
his much-revered 1998 PlayStation game, Metal Gear Solid.
Kojima admits that at its core Metal Gear Solid is really the childhood game of
hide-and-seek brought to life on a TV screen. "When Snake flattens himself
against the wall to avoid enemies, I always think back to the days when I was a
boy playing with my friends," he says as his eyes glance down at a bug sheet
listing the remaining problems with the game.
Kojima says that Snake's sneaky tactics are inspired by his love of hide and
seek.
While looking at the list, Kojima begins to slowly shake his head and sigh. His
body language says what he doesn't speak aloud: Unfortunately, building a game
the size and scope of Metal Gear Solid 2 is a lot tougher than calling up some
friends to arrange a game of hide-and-seek. "You see this callus on my finger?"
Kojima asks. "Well, that's from me using so many highlighters to go through all
the bugs. I use up at least two highlighter pens a day."
Today, if there's any type of hide-and-seek going on, it's among the programmers
who are furiously trying to hunt down the final bugs in the game. In the main
development area, a war-room-like space no larger than a high school gymnasium,
70 programmers, designers, musicians, and artists are part of the blandly
named "Production Department #1" responsible for Metal Gear Solid 2. In one
corner of the room Scott Dolph, international affairs manager, walks by and pulls
out his cell phone--it has the Metal Gear Solid 2 theme programmed as a ring
tone. The phone begins to play the theme; you get the sense everyone has heard it
just a few times before.
After surveying the room you can tell the team, half of which is newly graduated
from college,
is tired. But they are still determined. In his sound studio, Kazuki Muraoka
works on placing the final sound effects. There's no doubt the high-tech world of
video games is much different from what it was like for him to play bass in his
high school band, School's Out. But he enjoys the challenge. "Each and every
surface in the game has to have the right sound attached to it," he says. "That
means thousands and thousands of surfaces have to be checked. I have to go
through every scene in the game and make sure the right sound is played when you
walk over each surface." Now, Muraoka thinks he is almost done checking every
nook and cranny in the game.
Tonight, each and every employee on the 70-person team has his or her own little
nook and cranny to check. What must be two hundred different TV and computer
monitors all glow with images from different parts of an epic game that is part
high-tech hide-and-seek, part Jerry Bruckheimer-esque action movie, and 100
percent a Hideo Kojima game. And it's a game that almost didn't make it out this
year.
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"I was worried that it would be absolutely impossible for us to finish Metal Gear
Solid 2 this year."
-Hideo Kojima
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"When I was flying back from E3 in May, I was really worried," admits
Kojima. "Not worried in the sense that we might not be able to finish the game. I
was worried that it would be absolutely impossible for us to finish Metal Gear
Solid 2 this year, the year of the snake." Hidden behind closed doors for most of
the year as part of a self-imposed media and communications blackout, Kojima says
that what happened behind the scenes was a frantic race to realize the
impossible. "I must tell you, I was sitting here in June and thinking that no
matter how hard anyone on the team could work we would not finish the game this
year. And that was the toughest point in my 15 years in the game industry."
"I kept saying to myself, 'Nothing is impossible.'" -Hideo Kojima
Yet today, what was once thought impossible is now within reach. The bugs in the
game are down to the final few; Kojima knows he is within hours of finishing the
game. So how did the impossible turn into a realizable goal? Kojima ponders the
question for a moment. "Well," he explains, "there was something that always
encouraged me. Leonardo da Vinci is someone I respect a lot as an artist and a
scientist. He was brilliant. But the one thing he said was impossible was flying
to the moon." Kojima gives a dramatic pause. "And you know what? Flying to the
moon ended up being possible. So I kept saying to myself, 'Nothing is
impossible.'"
Impossible it wasn't. This is how they did it...
While hide-and-go-seek might have entertained Kojima as a young boy, by the time
he was at the university he found himself enamored with a new pastime: video
games. "It was after I played Super Mario Brothers and Xevious on my Famicom that
I said, 'Oh wow, this is a new form of entertainment.'"
The first Metal Gear game, released in 1987.
For Kojima, the discovery of video games was not just a way to pass his time but
the opportunity to learn about a new form of entertainment. Always a fan of
movies and entertainment, Kojima spent his teenage years watching TV shows such
as Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie and movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and
Taxi Driver. "I really did want to become a film director," he explains. "The
people of my generation are visually oriented. Unfortunately we can't go out
ourselves and film our own professional films because of the cost."
Still, Kojima had ideas and stories he wanted to tell--so he turned to the
written page. "What I did to realize what was in my mind was write novels, but it
was frustrating because I wanted to do things visually," he says. Although he
wrote a number of long novels at university, once Kojima began exploring video
games he saw the perfect opportunity to blend his storytelling with a visual
medium that would, at least in its early days, be much more economical to produce
than a feature film. (Today, Kojima has said that Metal Gear Solid 2's budget is
around what it costs to make a Japanese Godzilla film, approximately US$10
million).
As soon as he graduated from the university in 1986, Kojima was hired by Konami
as a game planner. Right from the start, one of Kojima's first projects was an
MSX game entitled Metal Gear, which was also developed for the Nintendo Famicom
soon thereafter. The game followed the exploits of Solid Snake, an operative for
the elite Special Forces unit FOXHOUND, who was sent to Africa to investigate a
strange weapon of mass destruction named Metal Gear. While the game was a success
and Kojima produced a few additional Metal Gear games, he would also go on to
work on other products such as Snatcher for the Sega CD and Policenauts, a Sega
Saturn game that was never released in the US.
Kojima's breakout game came in 1998 with the release of Metal Gear Solid.
Debuting at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in 1997, Metal Gear Solid for
the PlayStation continued the adventures of Solid Snake, taking him on a mission
titled the Shadow Moses Incident on a desolate island in the Alaskan Fox
Archipelago. With breathtaking graphics and a gameplay style that championed
lurking in the shadows and sleuth over brawn and bullets, Metal Gear Solid's
release on October 19, 1998, was a landmark in the eyes of many PlayStation
gamers in the United States and Europe, who collectively bought nearly 5 million
copies of it. (The game was less of a success in Japan, selling only 1 million
copies.)
With the game becoming such a worldwide sensation, gamers who finished MGS were
universally asking one question: When is the sequel coming out? "There were no
plans for a sequel when MGS shipped," explains Kojima. "But once the game came
out and we received so much acclaim, I decided we had to do a sequel." So, even
before the end of 1998, Kojima was thinking up a plan for Metal Gear Solid 2. "In
November 1998 I started to work on a plot for the sequel, and we also discussed
the possibility of making this game for Sony's next-generation hardware," he
says.
Kojima was interested in taking the game of hide-and-seek to a new level with the
sequel. "I still wanted this to be a stealth game," he says. "But I wanted to
make sure we weren't just trying to improve the graphics by taking this game to
the PlayStation 2. I was actually more concerned with making things seem more
realistic so the player would feel part of the setting."
Kojima set out a three-pronged approach to improving the sequel. First, he wanted
to give players more opportunities to hide. One early idea that made it to the
final game was the concept of letting a player hide inside a locker. Second,
Kojima hoped to create more intricate levels and environments, especially in
terms of improving what he calls the "air" or "presence" of the game, meaning the
wind and rain and other atmospheric effects. Finally, one of the largest gameplay
improvements he wanted to include was significantly enhanced artificial
intelligence. "With Metal Gear Solid we could only have four enemies in a scene
at a time and only two could be onscreen," explains Kazunobu Uehara, the lead
programmer on the game, who has worked with Kojima for almost a decade. "For this
game we wanted to show more soldiers and have each of them do more interesting
things as a team." The goal was set to devote a full 30 percent of the computer
processing time to artificial intelligence routines.
Another goal of Kojima's was to write a script and plot that would neatly
dovetail with the messages in the first Metal Gear Solid game. MGS discussed the
threats associated with nuclear proliferation and scientific issues such as
cloning one's genes, as evinced by the "Les Enfants Terribles" project that
produced Solid Snake and his two brothers, Liquid and Solidus. For this game,
Kojima wanted to talk about what was not in one's genes.
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"I wanted both games to work together as a message about what it necessary in
order to pass things onto the future."
-Hideo Kojima
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"I wanted both games to work together as a message about what is necessary in
order to pass things on to the future," he says while still checking over bugs in
his office. As a boy, Kojima read about horrors such as Auschwitz; in addition,
both his parents were born in the 1930s and lived through the firebombing of
World War II. He says those memories were important to him, and such memories
cannot effectively be passed along simply by one's genes. In other words, one's
memories, emotions, and personal hardships are just as important as any
scientific matter. This theme, he says, was partly inspired by his ruminations on
how to best pass along his values and beliefs to his young son.
By the end of 1998 the core game mechanic and message of the game were
solidified. But one thing Kojima had yet to pass on to his team was his radical
idea of introducing a new playable character. Yoji Shinkawa, the 29-year-old
character designer behind the Metal Gear Solid series, admits that he had a few
inklings that Kojima was already thinking about trying something new. "When we
had debuggers and testers play the first game, a lot of the comments coming back
were, 'You only play rugged old-looking guys in these games,'" he says. "I think
Mr. Kojima heard those people very loud and clear, because even in late 1998 he
was suggesting that maybe we should throw a young handsome-looking man into the
next game. But to be honest, I thought he was joking around." It turns out he
wasn't joking around.
By early 1999 Kojima had come up with most of the game's plot. Players would
start off onboard the tanker ship Discovery in the New York harbor. While
everyone assumed that Snake would remain the main playable character in the game
beyond the tanker, Kojima had an idea: Why not make Snake a part of the game but
let the player see him from the perspective of someone completely new?
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"Solid Snake is still the main character in Metal Gear Solid 2."
-Hideo Kojima
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"When I was thinking about this game and the characters, I thought of the
Sherlock Holmes series," he says. "Those books are written in the first person,
but the narrator isn't Sherlock Holmes; it's Watson." Kojima says that this model
inspired him to think of making the narrator in Metal Gear Solid 2 someone other
than the main character. Before long, he had come up with a new character--a
handsome and sensitive character who at first blush looks like the polar opposite
of the gruff and antagonistic Solid Snake. "I really thought I would be able to
better tell the story of Snake from the third person with this new character as
our narrator for the majority of the game." But Kojima is adamant that MGS2 is
still a game about Snake. "Make no mistake about it," he states. "Solid Snake is
still the main character in Metal Gear Solid 2 even though he is not the main
narrator this time around."
Kojima says that the introduction of this new character, code-named Raiden, also
helped him solve another problem involving Snake and his relationship with Otacon
and the coder-decoder interface (CODEC), frequently used throughout the game to
convey important information. "When Metal Gear first came out 14 years ago, Snake
was a rookie," he explains. "But Solid Snake truly became a hero after Metal Gear
Solid, and he really doesn't need any more advice through the CODEC." If Snake
could no longer use the CODEC, Kojima needed to create a new character who could
make use of the CODEC--an important tool used to educate new players about how to
interact with the game. Thus, the mysterious Raiden was born.
All of the characters in Metal Gear are created by Kojima in collaboration with
Shinkawa. In early 1999, Kojima first told Shinkawa of his idea for a new
protagonist in the story. "Mr. Kojima comes up to me and says, 'Can you draw this
type of character?'" says Shinkawa, who admits he is often somewhat rebellious in
his character design. Shinkawa says his rebelliousness is by design. "What fun
would it be if I drew exactly what Mr. Kojima told me to do? What I try to do is
realize my ideas along with his in the final design. That way the final character
will inspire Mr. Kojima to take the series in a new direction."
Within a matter of days Shinkawa created his first sketch for Raiden, a version
he says is remarkably similar to the final product. While designing Raiden's look
may have been relatively easy, Shinkawa says creating the female heroes for
Kojima's games are always much more difficult, sometimes taking months to
perfect. Why? "Well to be honest, I think characters like Rose and Naomi are Mr.
Kojima's ideal women...but they are not my ideal women," he says laughing. "You
know, Mr. Kojima likes those intelligent scientist types."
The issue of likes and dislikes was a major topic of discussion among the core
team for Metal Gear Solid 2, most of whom returned from the first game and many
of whom have worked with Kojima for nearly a decade. Some liked the idea of
Raiden; others were a little taken aback by Kojima's decision to introduce a new
playable character. Yoshikazu Matsuhana, the assistant director for the project,
who started at Konami as a game tester on Metal Gear: Solid Snake, was one of
those who questioned the idea. "I wasn't sure this weak-looking guy was going to
be well received by the fans," he says. "But we all trust Mr. Kojima because he
has so many hits under his belt. He is basically allowed to do what he wants."
Then again, Kojima probably wasn't too concerned about fan reaction in the short
term. After all, if things went according to plan, fans wouldn't even find out
about Raiden until they bought a copy of the game off a store shelf.
When you first sit down to play Metal Gear Solid 2, you assume the role of Snake
for the opening sequence. But soon the tables turn--Snake disappears and you take
control of Raiden. It's a twist that even the most die-hard Metal Gear fans
surely won't be expecting.
And that's exactly what Kojima wanted to have happen. "I really love the movie
Terminator 2," he explains. "That movie was so great because you never knew that
Arnold Schwarzenegger was the good cyborg when the movie started. When he appears
at the beginning you assume he is bad like the first movie. But then it turns out
he is good. I remember being so surprised by that turn of events." Taking his
inspiration from that film, Kojima devised a plot device that would let him shock
players in much the same way with Raiden's introduction. "When they reached the
Plant chapter of the game I wanted them to wonder what was going on. And then
they will meet this interesting character named Pliskin who looks and sounds like
Snake. But is he Snake?"
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"This is my Metal Gear and I can destroy it if I want to."
-Hideo Kojima, commenting on the possible negative reaction to Raiden.
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Some members of the team expressed concern that players would want to play Solid
Snake throughout the entire sequel, but Kojima says he was determined to bring a
secret new character to the game. "Was I scared that people might not be happy
about the new character? Not really," he says. "In a sequel you have to meet
people's expectations, but you also sort of have to go against them and deceive
them I think. This is my Metal Gear, and I can destroy it if I want to."
In 1999 destruction wasn't on the team's mind; instead, they were thinking more
about creation and how they were going to bring Kojima's vision to life. As a
first step, after E3 in 1999 the team went on a research trip to New York City.
There, the team visited landmarks such as the George Washington Bridge, Federal
Hall, and even a New York City police station, where Shinkawa dressed up in a
bomb suit, a piece of equipment that later served as the inspiration for the
design of the game's Fatman character.
Back in Japan, the programming team was beginning to think about how it could
bring the world of Metal Gear Solid 2 to life on Sony's PlayStation 2 hardware.
In late 1999 the team received a development kit from Sony. Uehara says the team
never quite believed Sony's statements that the PS2 and its Emotion Engine were a
dream machine. "We knew it was only a computer," he says. "We honestly tried not
to have huge imaginations that we knew couldn't be realized in the end. Instead,
we took a wait-and-see approach and hoped for the best."
A group of programmers experiment with the PlayStation 2 development kit.
When the development kit arrived, the team began what would amount to six weeks
of experimentation with the hardware--programmers, sound technicians, and artists
vetted the machine by putting it through rigorous tests. "We had our programmer
Mr. Takabe spend a month researching the machine and experimenting with it,"
explains Matsuhana, assistant director. After the experimentation was done,
Matsuhana spent a week interviewing everyone on the team to determine how fast
they could build a game. "By the end of 1999 I had determined that we could
finish a game in 2001--appropriately enough the year of the snake," he reminds.
So a target date was set: a new Metal Gear for 2001.
As the programming team spent additional time testing out the PlayStation 2,
Kojima began the long and arduous process of creating the scriptment, a massive
document that would, when complete, detail every scene and line of dialogue in
the game.
Aware of the limits of the PlayStation 2, Kojima turned to writing the
scriptment. "The scriptment really involves two senses of plot," he says. "First
is the plot in terms of the story, and second is the plot in terms of the actual
gameplay. I don't think they can exist without each other--they have to be
written and conceived together."
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"I have to conceive of a scene in terms of the plot and the gameplay, but I also
have to know if it is technically possible to pull it off."
-Kojima on writing the scriptment for the game
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For a game as massive as Metal Gear Solid 2, Kojima plays what he calls "catch-
ball" with his collaborator Mr. Fukushima and the entire development staff. While
Kojima is the final arbiter of what goes in the game, his collaborative "catch-
ball" process involves all the core members of the team. "I have to conceive of a
scene in terms of the plot and the gameplay, but I also have to know if it is
technically possible to pull it off," he explains. One such scene that he
initially conceived but later realized would not be possible involved a massive
flood sequence. "I had this scene of a flood with people being washed away," he
remembers. "I wanted to ask the player to swim through this flood and make sure
they don't drown. But it didn't happen, largely because the technology would have
been hard to do."
The programmers work with Kojima to see if his ideas are technically feasible.
That's not to say all the sequences in the game were a cakewalk to pull off. In
the scriptment Kojima details every visual detail he wants in a sequence. For
example, the opening tanker scene in New York is written out in extensive detail
in the scriptment. "I will describe whether we want to show all the droplets of
water on the person's raincoat and where I want to see fog," he states. Then it
is up to the programming team to design the technology needed to pull off such a
sequence. "We never tell Mr. Kojima that anything is impossible--we will always
give it a try," says Uehara, sounding like he has already been schooled by Kojima
about removing 'impossible' from his vocabulary. "But when I read the scriptment
for that opening scene--with the list of the ripples, the water, the reflections
in the water, the mist--I was very up front with Mr. Kojima and said, 'This is
going to be very difficult to do.' But I think we came up with something that is
reasonably close to what was in the scriptment."
Using business cards and an audio tape, Kojima demonstrates how he conceived of
the Big Shell levels in the game.
As the programming team works on realizing some of the visual aspects of the
game, Kojima spends a substantial amount of time working with the scenario and
design team, a group of about 12 individuals--a significant number of whom are
women--to design the actual gameplay. For each scene in the game, Kojima will
draw out a detailed map of how the player should move through the area. "For the
first game we actually built the levels with LEGO blocks and then ran a little
camera through the LEGO to understand the player perspective," he says. "But this
game got so complicated with multiple floors that we had to do things in CGI and
actually act out some scenarios in the office."
By early 2000 the team in Tokyo was making significant progress. The scriptment
was complete, even though Kojima admits the final scriptment was nearly cut in
half from the original version. Best of all, the team was beginning to reach a
point where it could bring the game up on a TV monitor and see certain test
sequences brought to life, including backgrounds, enemies, and items.
The initial tests were impressive; the game was starting to look like an action
movie. So it made sense that Kojima's next idea was to call a famous Hollywood
film composer and ask him to help bring the audio portion of the game to life.
Just as the graphics in Metal Gear Solid 2 look light years ahead of what the
team was able to do
for the series' first incarnation 14 years ago, the sound effects and music have
progressed from telephone-keypad-like beeps to full-on symphony orchestra sonic
landscapes. Kojima, being the film buff that he is, is often right on top of all
the latest Hollywood action movies, so much so that he frequently attends the
cinema with Muraoka, the manager and sound director of Konami's sound design
section. "We often see movies together--it is our pastime," explains Muraoka, who
goes on to say that Kojima is always looking at films from the perspective of a
director, whereas he himself is just looking to be entertained. Do he and Kojima
often disagree about films? "Yes. Whenever I'm about to say, 'I really liked this
movie,' Mr. Kojima always says, 'That movie sucked,' and I feel like I can't
really tell him what I think."
Both Mr. Kojima and Mr. Muraoka loved the music in The Replacement Killers.
While they may have different tastes in movies--the last film they saw was Tomb
Raider (thumbs up from Kojima, thumbs down from Muraoka), the two ended up
agreeing on one thing after seeing the 1998 Chow Yun-Fat film The Replacement
Killers: The music in the movie was fantastic. "I just loved the modern
percussion sound by Harry Gregson-Williams," says Kojima. "As soon as we saw that
movie I turned to Mr. Muraoka and said, 'This is the guy for Metal Gear Solid 2.'"
Of course you might think firming up the services of one of Hollywood's busiest
composers, who has worked on everything from the recently released Spy Game to
Shrek to The Rock, might be a bit of a challenge, even for a revered game creator
such as Kojima. Think again, because Kojima and Muraoka already had a plan.
Besides telling Rika Muranaka, the writer of the ending themes for MGS1 and 2, to
contact Gregson-Williams, Kojima started to put together a CD of his favorite
Harry Gregson-Williams music. Within days he shipped the CD off to the composer
at his nondescript Santa Monica, California, studio, Media Ventures, and awaited
a response.
"So this one day I received this odd home-burnt CD in the mail," Gregson-Williams
says as he sits in his studio the day after finishing work on Spy Game. "The CD
had all my music on it, but it was almost creepy. It had music on there from
movies where, at least to my knowledge, a soundtrack has never been released.
There was even music on there from films in which I had collaborated with other
composers. Somehow the person who put this CD together knew exactly which music
in those movies was scored by me." Gregson-Williams says he was inordinately
impressed by the CD author's ability to pick out his music. "I really couldn't
say no to this project after that."
Taking on the project in early 2000 for six weeks of work, Gregson-Williams was
excited by
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"For this project it was different. I had no visuals at all."
-Harry Gregson-Williams
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the idea of working on a game, even though he doesn't own a PlayStation and has
played only one game: Pong. "Just about everything I do is conditioned by the
pictures in a movie--every move and shake in the music depends on what's on the
screen," he says. "For this project it was different. I had no visuals at all. I
didn't see the game at all. They just gave me some adjectives for themes, and I
composed off of those words."
With the team in Tokyo and Gregson-Williams in Santa Monica, communication was
handled over e-mail and by Gregson-Williams sending his music to Japan in MP3
format. "I really just started writing music to the adjectives they gave me," he
says, skimming down a CD of music for the game with a track listing that goes
from "Sneaky 1" to "Sneaky 6." "I don't know who is going to name all
these 'sneaky' songs for the soundtrack CD, but it's definitely not me," he says
with a laugh.
Gregson-Williams would write down adjectives on Post-it notes and then put those
notes above his computer console. He started with the adjective sneaky and then
moved on to others such as noble, full-on action, and heroic. These pods of music
would typically be written in one-minute segments and sent to the team in Japan.
While it might be suggested that the use of adjectives was the only way to
communicate across a language barrier, Muraoka says the limited communication was
by design and not due to language issues. "If we gave him too-specific
instructions it would no longer be his music, and we wanted Harry's music as he
does it all the time," he says.
While Gregson-Williams' suites of adjective-inspired music were set to be used
for the main game, the team in Japan also asked him to compose a special melodic
piece that would be used for a trailer at E3 2000 in Los Angeles, the official
unveiling of the project. As Gregson-Williams tirelessly worked to complete this
theme, the team back in Tokyo was furiously trying to come up with the visuals to
show at E3 2000.
In early April 2000, Matsuhana knew that E3 was only six weeks away. E3 was an
important
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"Everyday leading up to the show I was worried we wouldn't have something ready
to show."
-Mr. Matsuhana on the E3 2000 show
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milestone for the team, especially given that Metal Gear Solid's debut at E3 1997
put that game on the map. "Mr. Kojima knew that E3 2000 was the perfect time to
debut the game to the public," Matsuhana recalls while sitting in a conference
room at Konami. "It was, without question, very important that we had a trailer
ready. But to be honest, every day leading up to the show I was worried we
wouldn't have something ready to show."
The first polygon demo of Snake jumping onboard the tanker.
Kojima's idea was to debut Metal Gear Solid 2 with a nine-minute video trailer
that would show scene after scene of action from the game's tanker sequence. Keen
on making sure Raiden was kept a secret, Kojima personally started to record and
edit the footage for the trailer, much of it taken from what the team calls a
polygon demo, known to most North American gamers as an in-game cinematic or
cutscene. By mid-April the entire team saw the first finished polygon demo, a
short sequence that showed Solid Snake jumping off the George Washington Bridge
and landing on the tanker. "As soon as I saw that polygon demo I said, 'Wow! This
is going to be a great trailer.' We definitely had something special," remembers
Shinkawa.
The enemy AI plays an important part in the game and the trailers.
At least they hoped they were going to have something special--that is, if they
could pull together nine minutes of great footage in time for the E3 deadline. "A
game trailer like the one for MGS2 is very hard to put together," explains
Matsuhana. "You have to rely on the AI to do certain things. A movie director can
just tell an actor to walk in a certain direction, but a lot of our time was
spent just shooting bullets in certain directions and hoping the enemies would
react in a certain way." Time and again, Kojima would attempt to create
breathtaking action scenes literally by chance encounters. "Eventually we
realized it would actually be faster to go in and reprogram some of the enemy AI
for the trailer so the soldiers would do exactly what we wanted them to do,"
admits Matsuhana.
As the trailer started to coalesce, the team in Japan informed Konami of America
that it would be bringing a nine-minute trailer to E3. At first, the executives
in America were worried that such a long trailer would overshadow the rest of the
company's product lineup for 2000. "We said to Kojima, 'Wait a minute, our whole
reel is only 30 minutes, and you want to take up a third of it?'" recalls Ken
Ogasawara, the American localization producer on the project. Of course this
reaction was knee-jerk and no one had any idea of how amazing the trailer would
end up being when complete. In fact, no one outside of the development offices in
Japan had seen anything related to Metal Gear Solid 2. "We hadn't seen a video, a
screenshot, a logo, or anything on the game until a week before E3 last year,"
explains Jason Enos in Konami's US marketing department.
Part of the reason Kojima had been holding the game so close to his chest had to
do with his fears about how it would be received by the public. "I know this will
sound trite in retrospect, but honestly we had no idea what other companies were
doing for the PS2," he recollects. "We weren't very confident about how we should
present our visuals, especially since we put more focus on the environment and
the effects than the number of polygons in the characters." Although Kojima was
desperately trying to find out what his competitors were up to, he says that even
weeks before E3 the team had no idea how their work compared to that of their
contemporaries. "I was just so scared because I didn't know what the new Resident
Evil or Final Fantasy or Tomb Raider games were going to look like."
Matsuhana goes as far as to say that the days leading up to E3 2000 were some of
the darkest for the team--a complete low point in development. "I know people
will read this and say, 'How could they not have been excited about the
trailer?'" he admits. "But when we started to see screenshots leak out of
competitors' products in the days leading up to E3, we became very worried that
the public wouldn't like the direction we were taking the game."
International Affairs Manager Scott Dolph made a mini-disc tape so Mr. Kojima
could practice his English speech.
But soon there would be no point in worrying--on May 8, Kojima boarded a flight
from Narita Airport to Los Angeles with a nine-minute videotape firmly tucked
into his suitcase. On the plane he spent time listening again and again to a
minidisc tape made by Scott Dolph, the only English-speaking employee in Konami's
Ebisu office. On the disc, Dolph recorded a short speech that Kojima was trying
to learn in English. Two days later, he would give that speech in front of a
packed audience and unveil Metal Gear Solid 2 to the world.
May 10, 2000, is a day that will surely stand out in the minds of many gamers,
not to mention the
150 journalists who packed a screening room at Universal Studios in Los Angeles
at 5:00pm for the unveiling of Metal Gear Solid 2. After a long day of press
conferences, including Sony's massive event announcing the PS2 launch date and
price, many felt that Konami had saved the best for last. Promptly at 5:00pm
Kojima got up in front of the crowd and began his remarks. At one point he looked
up from the lectern and said, "I'm back!" to cheers from the crowd. The lights
dimmed and a green ratings card came up on the screen, just like those seen
before movie trailers. This one said, "This Game Is Approved for All Gamers."
Over the next nine minutes a mesmerizing array of images appeared on the screen.
The melodic Gregson-Williams theme powered through the speakers, and the crowd
witnessed action sequences that looked like they had been literally lifted out of
movies such as The Rock or a James Bond film. The tanker sequence that Kojima had
written up in the scriptment was the main focus of the trailer--the puddles were
there, as were the wind effects, the reflections, and the stunning animations.
When Snake's archenemy, Revolver Ocelot, appeared in the trailer, the crowd
cheered; a close-up of Solid Snake's face only further keyed up the audience.
Before long, some journalists wondered just how long the trailer could go on--it
just looked too good, too polished, and too powerful to be a real game. When the
trailer was over and the MGS2 logo came up, the crowd burst into applause and
proceeded to give Kojima a standing ovation. The game could not have received a
warmer reception.
During E3, Konami showed the nine-minute trailer on a large video wall at its
booth at the top of every hour. At 15 minutes before the hour the audience would
grow so large that the E3 staff became concerned that the huge crowds posed a
fire hazard. Even developers in the crowd would watch the trailer again and again
and not believe what they were seeing on the screen.
George Broussard of 3D Realms Entertainment, creator of Duke Nukem, was one of
those blown away by the trailer. "You just knew you were seeing the high-water
mark for games. No matter how experienced a developer you are, you look at Metal
Gear and say, 'Wow.'" Jason Rubin of fellow top-flight PS2 developer Naughty Dog
echoes Broussard's sentiments: "We are continually inspired by the way in which
Mr. Kojima has slowly mastered the art of mixing storytelling and gameplay into a
seamless game/movie experience." Even Gregson-Williams was dazzled when he
finally saw his music combined with the work done in Japan. "It was very nearly a
film," he remembers. "It was truly breathtaking to see my music hooked up to
those visuals."
Metal Gear Solid 2 had become the game of the show. While Kojima insisted that
the video trailer represented in-game footage, some cynics suggested the images
were too good to be true--there was no way a game could actually look and play
like that. But there was no question that the trailer was impressive. In the span
of a few short days Metal Gear Solid 2 had quickly become the most anticipated
PlayStation 2 game--and it was still at least 18 months away from release.
Ready to celebrate, Kojima and the team made it a point to try some karaoke, a
secret pastime of the team. Kojima enjoys singing falsetto. "I don't think people
realize how much Mr. Kojima loves karaoke," points out Matsuhana, who sheepishly
admits that even he has been known to enjoy a karaoke Billy Joel song once in a
while. "Mr. Kojima and Scott Dolph are huge Earth, Wind & Fire fans, and Mr.
Kojima also immensely enjoys L'Arc en Ciel, the Japanese rock group who did the
ending theme for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," states Matsuhana. Singing
karaoke was the ultimate release for the team--a chance to celebrate what had
been accomplished.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I remember sitting on that plane and just saying to myself quietly, 'I need to
keep my cool here.'"
-Hideo Kojima on the success of the E3 trailer
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Flying back to Tokyo after the show, Kojima was on top of the world. "Those few
days were the best time of my life, to be honest," he recalls with a smile on his
face, as if to suggest the pressure of the final hours has made him almost forget
how great it felt a year ago. "I remember sitting on that plane and just saying
to myself quietly, 'I need to keep my cool here. I need to not get too excited or
consider myself a star. I need to maintain a level of humbleness.'" While Metal
Gear Solid earned him respect and a following of hard-core fans, Metal Gear Solid
2's trailer served as the spark that ignited a frenzy that elevated Kojima to a
level on par with Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.
Kojima was feeling pretty good about himself when he got back to Tokyo. In fact,
he couldn't wait to tell his wife about how he had the best few days in his life.
Arriving at his house in Tokyo, Kojima greeted his wife and began to tell her
about E3. "I told her how great everything went, and she just sort of said, 'Oh
really? That's nice,'" he recalls with a laugh. "It was really sad because I
couldn't even begin to share my true level of excitement with her. I really wish
she would have been there to see the reaction at E3."
Perhaps his wife's reaction was exactly what Kojima needed--a humbling experience
to make him realize one thing: The game was far from done. While E3 2000 was a
high point for the team, the pressure would only grow more intense. From now on,
all eyes would turn to see if Kojima and his team could make a game that lived up
to the hype and acclaim bestowed upon it.
Back from E3, Kojima and key members of the team, such as Shinkawa, Matsuhana,
and Uehara, decided to leave Tokyo and spend a few days in late June at a Konami
training facility 90 minutes outside of town. Here, the key members of the team
would nail down the final decisions about how to proceed with the game. First, a
decision was made to create a demonstration version of the product for release
with Zone of the Enders, another Kojima-produced title that would ship in Japan
at the end of the year and in the US in early 2001.
The meeting in rural Tokyo was a good way for the group to gear up for the second-
half of the game's production schedule, which included finishing the demo by the
end of the year. While executing the existing scriptment was a priority, the team
never stopped innovating and was always brainstorming new last-minute ideas. For
example, Kojima was coming up with new ideas for the game on a daily basis. "He's
really a very humorous person," says Uehara. "He came to me one day last summer
and said, 'Let's do something with girlie magazines and tossing them on the
floor. I want the soldiers to walk by and then pick them up and go, "Wow!"'"
Besides being funny, the feature would enhance gameplay by giving the player
another way to distract the guards. "It took us about three days to put that
feature in, but it was well worth it," believes Uehara.
Other employees contributed ideas as well--or more accurately, were required to
contribute ideas on a daily basis. "Each person on the team has an idea book,"
explains Matsuhana. "You have to write down at least one idea a day in this book.
I collect these books from everyone, and then Mr. Kojima and I review them." For
most of the employees on the team, the ultimate validation comes when Kojima
decides to pen a response in their idea book. "It's always a fun part of the day
when I return the idea books," Matsuhana admits. "Everyone rushes to open their
book to see if Mr. Kojima has written them a response. And if there is no
response, the team member looks somewhat dejected at first but then is motivated
to think of an even better idea for tomorrow."
While ideas were flying back and forth between everyone on the development team
throughout 2000, the first big deadline came when the demo version was completed
in November of 1999. Luckily, the demo was completed right on schedule. But while
the demo of the tanker scene was finished on time, there were already signs that
the rest of the game was beginning to lag behind. "We finished the tanker demo on
time, but there were so many other environments in this game we had been
neglecting," says Matsuhana. After the relief of getting the demo out the door
subsided, the team was faced with the daunting reality that 2001 was only a few
weeks away, and the key building blocks for the full game were not yet complete.
"We started to see all the building blocks for the game and the characters moving
in the world," Matsuhana recalls, "but the real problem came when we tried to put
together those building blocks. Everything just started to fall apart, and it
didn't work correctly--the game wouldn't even load towards the end of 2000."
Without the full game engine working properly, the team would be unable to move
onto the important testing and tweaking phase of development.
"I really wanted to get to the point where we could start to test the full game's
gameplay. But we were nowhere near that point before the holidays last year,"
says Matsuhana. "Although it is my job to cheer everyone else up on the team, at
the end of 2000 I really needed some cheering up myself. I was not looking
forward to 2001."
Aware of the concerns about the game's progress, the team still decided to take
time off over Christmas, their last real vacation before entering serious crunch
mode. But things would only get worse in January, when Kojima and Matsuhana would
make a startling discovery that would confirm their worst fears about the
project.
Returning from their holiday vacations, the team knew that 2001 would be a tough
year for everyone, especially given MGS2's epic scope and the promise of a late-
2001 release. Given Matsuhana's concern about the state of the project, he
proposed to Kojima a method of checking the team's progress. "What I wanted to do
was compare our progress on MGS2 to its predecessor," he recollects. "So we'd
say, 'OK, MGS2 is 10 months from release--where were we 10 months before the
release of the previous game?'" Kojima liked the idea, thinking it would provide
a concrete way of determining how much was left to do.
Unfortunately, neither Matsuhana nor Kojima liked the result of their study.
"I spent about a week doing a comparison and contrast between the projects," says
Matsuhana. "And I really didn't like the answer I came up with. We realized we
were desperately behind with Metal Gear Solid 2." Asked exactly how far behind
they were, Matsuhana is embarrassed and just repeats the phrase "very desperately
behind." To put it in context, he later says that he was "certain the game would
not be released in 2001. We were going to do everything we could to finish the
game, but the prospects were very grim at the start of the year."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I wasn't a manager of the company I would probably be creating all these
weird games."
-Hideo Kojima
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Potentially missing the 2001 release date was of great concern to Kojima because,
in addition to being the game's creator, he is also the vice president of Konami
Computer Entertainment Japan. Wearing both business and creative hats means that
Kojima is well aware of the possible business implications of missing a key
holiday release date. In fact, Kojima says that being the vice president often
forces him to think of his games in terms of their sales potential. "I have so
many weird ideas," he says, "but I have to make sure my ideas will sell too. If I
wasn't a manager of the company, I would probably be creating all these weird
games. But as a manager I can't allow it." Speaking of weird ideas, Kojima once
had what he thought was a great concept: designing a product where the player
would be forced to buy a new copy of the game every time the player character
died. "As I said, I have some very impractical ideas," he admits with a grin.
Impractical or not, the team was going to try its best to ensure a 2001 release
date. Marketing and PR seemed to already be in the bag, thanks partly to the
March release of the playable demo version in the US, which silenced those
doubters who claimed the trailer footage couldn't have been actual in-game
footage. But even Kojima wasn't satisfied with the existing buzz. He decided he
wanted to return to E3 2001 with a new trailer of the game, although he once
again elected to not allow any playable copies of the full game to be shown.
The character of Raiden would be carefully edited out of all the footage used in
the trailer for E3 2001.
No doubt the decision to carefully inform the public about the game's content via
precut trailers stemmed from Kojima's initial directive that Raiden be kept an
absolute secret until the day of release. That's not an easy thing to do when
Raiden is the playable character for the majority of the game. But Kojima kept
true to his word, not even informing those at Konami of America about Raiden's
existence. "At E3 this year the word 'Raiden' wasn't even part of my vocabulary,"
explains Konami's Jason Enos.
Fans of the series wouldn't be finding out about Raiden anytime soon either--the
E3 2001 trailer would only further mislead them and be edited in a way that led
to months of speculation about the fate of Solid Snake.
======
part2
========
Kojima stood up in front of the audience at Sony's E3 2001 press conference and
kept
Mr. Kojima stands in front of the crowd at Sony's press conference and introduces
the new trailer.
his remarks brief. "I just got off the plane from Japan," he said, "and I bring
you the new Metal Gear Solid 2 trailer." Just like the trailer the year before,
this trailer included nearly 10 minutes of new action sequences from the game.
But given that so much of the tanker sequence had been shown off in the first
demo, the team was faced with a difficult decision: How do we keep Raiden's
existence a secret yet also show some of the fantastic new action sequences from
the later parts of the game?
A creative solution was devised. Parts of the game would actually be modified to
include them in the E3 trailer. So, what appeared in the trailer as a fight
between Snake and Fortune was, in actuality, a duel between Raiden and Fortune
where Kojima swapped in Snake for Raiden. Likewise, the trailer showed a sequence
involving a Harrier jet over the George Washington Bridge in New York. While a
similar sequence existed in the real game, it actually took place in a completely
different environment that had yet to be revealed to anyone outside of the Konami
development office.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He wanted us to wonder, 'Are we really seeing everything there is to be told or
is something being edited out?'"
-Producer Ken Ogasawara on the E3 trailers
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reflecting on his trailers that some may say misled gamers, Kojima seems
completely fine with his sneaky tactics. "The whole E3 thing with the footage was
part of the experience that leads up to playing the game," he suggests. And while
fans didn't know about the character swapping at the time of E3, most did start
to wonder about a sequence that apparently showed Solid Snake drowning in the
waters off New York. Fans were left to wonder, "Is Snake dead?"
This text at the end of the trailer signaled the start of the team's 6-month
submerge period.
US producer Ken Ogasawara thinks the speculation about the game created by the
trailers was right in keeping with Kojima's message and strategy for the
sequel. "One of the themes in the game is about digital information," he
explains. "There is so much out there that we never know what is real or not. And
Kojima was trying to hammer that home with all the trailers and speculation. He
wanted us to wonder, 'Are we really seeing everything there is to be told, or is
something being edited out?'"
Reflecting on the submerge period, Kojima admits that he didn't know if it was
even possible to finish the game in 2001.
It turned out there was a lot being edited out as part of a wide-ranging and
calculated misinformation campaign on the part of Kojima. But another campaign
would soon be set out: a decision by Kojima to completely shut his team off from
the outside world until the game was complete. No doubt fueled by Kojima's
private concern that the game was behind schedule, the last frames of the E3 2001
trailer said "MGS2 SUBMERGES--WINTER 2001." This was Kojima's subtle way of
introducing his "submerge" media strategy, a complete and total communications
and media blackout that would extend from E3 until the launch of the game. There
would be no press interviews, no previews, and no new information about the game
released until it arrived on store shelves. While public statements about the
submerge strategy put a positive spin on it as a way for Kojima to concentrate on
the game, the truth was much darker: Submerge was absolutely necessary if the
team had any hope of finishing the game in 2001.
It's not surprising that flying back from E3 2001 was a much different experience
for Kojima than it was the year before. Asked how he felt after E3 2001 compared
with E3 2000, Kojima says there really is no comparison. "This year we were still
saying the game was coming in November," he remembers, "but on my way back to
Tokyo I was very scared. We had started our submerge strategy, and I knew that
the next few months would not be fun. It still looked very bleak for a 2001
release--to be honest, in my heart of hearts I thought a 2001 release would be
impossible."
Although Kojima returned to Tokyo from Los Angeles in mid-May, some of the team
would soon fly back across the Pacific with an 800-page script in tow, ready to
record the voices for the English version of the game--a crucial step on the road
to finishing the product.
If one aspect helped define the character of Snake more than anything else in the
original
Metal Gear Solid, it was his gruff voice, created by David Hayter, a well-known
voice-over actor who also wrote the script for the X-Men movie and is currently
at work on Watchmen and X-Men 2. According to Hayter, the way Snake sounds in the
game was an accident. "I've never told anyone this before, but the voice I
auditioned for Snake is actually different than the voice we ended up using," he
says at home in Los Angeles. "I honestly couldn't remember what voice I had
auditioned with when I went to do the real job. And when we reviewed the audition
tape, we found that Snake initially sounded a lot like me--but for some reason I
made his voice a lot rougher for the real deal."
The real deal would happen again over the summer months of 2001, as Hayter would
spend more than three weeks reading through some 800 pages of dialogue in a Los
Angeles recording studio. The recording sessions happened under the voice
direction of Kris Zimmerman and were supervised by Konami's Scott Dolph, who, in
addition to being the inspiration for the game's Commander Scott Dolph character,
also had a hand in translating all the dialogue from Japanese to English.
Hayter says that he was always keen to come back and reprise his role as Snake,
even though this summer he was in the midst of writing four different
screenplays. "I love this character, and it's always fun when people find out I'm
the voice of Snake," Hayter explains. "I don't look like him, so you wouldn't
know it on the street, but sometimes people find out and get incredibly excited."
Such an occurrence happened recently to Hayter when his friend James Van Der Beek
(Dawson's Creek) brought his brother into town. "We were all out at a bar, and
when I said I did the voice of Snake, his brother just freaked out. He wanted me
to talk as Snake for the rest of the night," remembers Hayter. "That was a great
moment for me."
Hayter spent a significant amount of time in the studio, but for most of the time
he was joined by a new member of the cast: Quinton Flynn, the voice of Raiden.
Flynn is a veteran actor who has voiced characters such as Johnny Quest and Timon
in the TV version of Disney's The Lion King. Both Hayter and Flynn admit they had
no idea about Raiden's extensive role in the game when they first showed up for
work on the sequel. "No one told me ahead of time about Raiden," admits
Hayter. "But I sort of figured out eventually that I was coaching Quinton's
character along." Hayter says that even now he isn't sure how much Snake is in
the game. But he plans to find out soon when he plays his copy--he claims to have
completed the first MGS game five times over.
For Flynn, joining the project as Raiden was a great opportunity for a meaty role-
-the only problem was that he couldn't tell anyone that he had landed the gig. "I
couldn't tell anyone I was playing Raiden," he recalls. "But a few days into the
project they did say to me, 'Quinton, mum's the word, but you are kind of the new
Snake.' That was pretty exciting to hear."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I definitely associated with Raiden's voyage and was amazed that a videogame
written in Japanese could have this strong a script."
-Quinton Flynn (Raiden)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Flynn says he immensely enjoyed the process of working in the studio with Konami
and Hayter. In fact, he goes as far as to say that Metal Gear Solid 2 is his
favorite voice-over project to date. "Through Raiden I got to go through the
journey of life we all go through--making choices and decisions and sometimes
finding out that those choices aren't where we want to go," he says. "I
definitely associated with Raiden's voyage and was amazed that a video game
written in Japanese could have this strong a script. It really felt like a motion
picture project to me."
By mid-July the team had finished recording all the key dialogue for the English
version of the game. Dolph immediately said good-bye to the voice cast and
returned to Tokyo with the DAT tapes, ready to prepare the dialogue for insertion
into the game. Will the actors meet up again in the studio? While neither Flynn
nor Hayter is signed on to do additional Metal Gear games, both say they would be
happy to reprise their roles if the series continues.
But continuing the series was not on Kojima's mind in the summer of 2001--he was
more concerned with figuring out if it was possible to finish this game before
the holidays. With 2001 more than halfway over and the game still lagging behind
schedule, Matsuhana and Kojima made an important decision: More team members
would be needed if the game had a hope of coming out in 2001.
"One way to solve a production problem is to bring on more people," matter-of-
factly states Matsuhana. A core team of 35 to 40 employees had been working on
the game since 1999, but during the final months of development the team would
balloon to 70 members, most of whom were brought over from other development
teams at Konami. "It negatively affected the other projects, but it was a huge
help to us," believes Matsuhana, who says the addition of the extra employees is
what really allowed the team to make a 2001 release possible.
Although the team would grow to be 70 members strong, everyone inside the
development office still tried to adhere to a process dubbed "Kojima-style." This
is a familial game-development approach where everyone is encouraged to
collaborate and discuss ideas with each other. "Back when we were a team of 10
working on Policenauts, we were a family," says Uehara. "Today, we try very hard
to keep that family feeling and are always talking to each other. You have to be
an extrovert to be on our team." This open style of development is further
evidenced by the large development room where no walls separate any of the
developers.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A natural high starts to kick in when you start to work with your coworkers into
the night."
-Mr. Matsuhana on crunch mode
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matsuhana explains that it is his job to "control everyone's emotional level" on
the team, even though he admits it is hard to do with upward of 70 members.
Developing a game 18 hours a day, seven days a week can take its toll on anyone,
but Matsuhana believes crunch mode is when the bond between the team can actually
grow strongest. "A natural high starts to kick in when you start to work with
your coworkers into the night," he says. But there are still sacrifices--
Matsuhana's second son was born in February, and he hasn't had the chance to see
him much. When asked what his wife thinks of his long hours, he laughs and puts
his index fingers above his head as if to mimic the Devil's horns.
Kojima himself knows firsthand what it feels like for Matsuhana and the other
employees with families. To lessen the time he spends away from his family,
Kojima often brings his young son into the office during the final months of
development--that is, if his son promises not to break anything. "When I come
into the office on Saturdays or Sundays I try to bring my son with me," he
says. "But I have to be careful. Once I brought him into the motion-capture
studio and he almost damaged quite a bit of equipment." Apparently Kojima's son,
who takes karate lessons, became interested in acting out his own action scene in
the motion-capture studio. "There was this scene we were filming where an actor
was flinging a blade," Kojima recalls with a laugh. "Well, when the scene was
over my son picked up the stick and started poking the actor and the sensors."
Yoji Shinkawa, here seen playing with a figure of Solid Snake, says that Kojima
is a very loving father.
Even if his son is putting expensive equipment at risk, Shinkawa says that
Kojima's son is clearly very near and dear to his heart. "He is a very loving
father--we are always hearing about how 'my son did this' and 'my son did that,'"
says Shinkawa. "I don't think it's any surprise that the whole theme of the game
involves passing things on to future generations. That is Kojima speaking as a
father about wanting to pass things on to his son."
The close atmosphere in the office even extends after hours. Often the team will
get together late at night to discuss progress on the game and the general state
of their lives. "There's this local Ramen noodle placed named Chorori," says
Matsuhana. "It's open until 4am and we will often go there at 1am if we are
working late. We will eat there, and, while we probably shouldn't be doing this,
we also have a few beers and talk about our personal lives and what is going on
inside our minds." So, even as the pressure mounts, the team makes sure it has
time to let off steam and build relationships with each other.
But as the final weeks of development approach, the team knows that even late-
night trips to Chorori will be out of the question. With the end of summer
setting in, the team now has literally only a few precious weeks to finalize the
game's many scenarios and polygon demos.
Tempting fate and trying to do the impossible is never easy--and it will just get
tougher when an unthinkable tragedy strikes during the final days of development.
With the team still busy creating the actual content for the game in late summer,
Kojima was the only person who actually had time to play through his game from
start to finish and concentrate on the tweaking and tuning process. "Normally a
few months before a game is completed the entire team should be able to play
through it," he remarks. "Unfortunately that was impossible given this schedule.
Everyone was too busy working on their specific parts of the game."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are going to be fewer bonuses in the US version than I would like."
-Hideo Kojima on one of the side effects of the game falling behind schedule
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Each day in August, Kojima locked himself into a small conference room at Konami.
There, he feverishly played through the game again and again, trying to figure
out how closely it resembled his original scriptment. At the same time, he began
thinking of little bonuses and surprise features to hide in the game. "There are
going to be fewer bonuses in the US version than I would like because of the lack
of time," he says. "But the good news is that I am going to add a lot more
bonuses to the Japanese version. You see, sometimes it pays to wait."
For many reasons Kojima would have preferred to wait to finish the game, but he
realized that releasing it before the holidays would be ideal--he knew if he
didn't have a release date he would forever be tweaking and tinkering. "If I had
to boil down our strategy of making games, it's really just the process of
creating, checking, playing, and destroying, and so on," he suggests. "This back
and forth is what makes a great game. Unfortunately we have had to cut down on
the number of times we go back and forth if we hope to finish the game this year.
But I still know it will be a great game when it's done."
Still, Kojima was adamant that corners not be cut unless they absolutely had to
be--he wasn't going to spend three years of hard work and an estimated $10
million budget on a game that would be pushed out the door. "In August I started
to see the game finally coming together," he remembers. "But I also knew we were
going to need as much time as possible to make sure it was great."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The message was that unless we were granted another week in development time we
were going to have to delay the game."
-Scott Dolph on his August e-mail to Konami
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So a tough decision was made. In mid-August, Kojima instructed Scott Dolph to e-
mail Konami of America with an urgent message: The game won't be able to make a
planned November 13 release unless the team is given more time in development.
While Konami had originally scheduled to start duplication of the game in early
September, Kojima wanted Konami to speed up the duplication process, thus giving
the team more time in development while still maintaining the same release
date. "I remember sending that e-mail and making it very stern and clear," says
Dolph. "The message was that unless we were granted another week in development
time we were going to have to delay the game."
Word came back from Konami US that another week would be added to the development
timetable--the first submission of Metal Gear Solid 2 was now scheduled for
Friday, September 14, 2001. While the extra week in development gave the team
some breathing room, there was no question that the first few weeks of September
would involve countless hours of testing and tweaking. Kojima would have to put
his entire life on hold--there would be no more movies with Muraoka and certainly
no karaoke for the time being. As Earth, Wind & Fire put it, there would be no
dancing in September...at least not yet.
As September 14 approached, the team worked tirelessly to complete the
game. "Things were really coming together, and barring any unforeseen
circumstances, we thought we were finally right on schedule," says Matsuhana.
Unfortunately, the most unthinkable of unforeseen events would strike the United
States on September 11. When news reached Japan of the terror attack, it was
already September 12--only two days before the first submission was due.
Besides being shocked at the events unfolding in the United States, the
developers immediately worried about how the unfolding tragedy might impact their
game. After all, the majority of the game is set around New York City. "As soon
as those terrible events occurred, we felt it necessary to make some very last-
minute changes to the game," says Matsuhana. For a team already under intense
pressure, having to retool certain sections of the game was the last thing it
needed with only 48 hours to go before the first submission. Now, what could have
been a peaceful end to development would end up being a frantic race to the
finish line.
Matsuhana admits that the team did make some last-minute changes to the game
because of the events of September 11, although he elected not to go into
specific details about what was changed. "There were only a few things we could
or couldn't do to change the game," he says as he sits in the Konami conference
room. "But please don't think we compromised the game in any way by
saying, 'Well, since we only have a few days we aren't going to change what we
should.' That wasn't our mentality. We did everything we could do to change the
game to reflect what happened in New York."
An artist makes last-minute adjustments to The last-minute changes may have made
the hectic final days that much more intense, but the team was still able to
submit its first candidate for the final version on September 14. This virtually
complete version was then extensively tested for the next few weeks, all leading
up to Friday, September 28, which was planned as the final day of development
before MGS2 was to be sent off to the duplication facility.
On the last day of development the team is clearly tired--in fact, some
programmers have been working so hard that their daily routine consists of
programming until they get tired and then putting their heads down on their desks
to sleep. A few hours later they wake up, only to start programming until they
tire and fall asleep again. While the development room is filled with toys and
tons of rival game systems, today every available monitor is devoted to playing
and testing Metal Gear Solid 2.
PlayStation 2 debug stations are lined up and prepared to test the final version
of the game.
Collectively, there must be at least 100 different copies of the game running at
a time today. In his programming area, Uehara looks tired as he sits at his PC
and skims his code to track down a last-minute bug. Beside him are at least eight
PS2 machines all standing side by side with hard drives attached--it is faster
for the team to copy a new version to a PS2 hard drive than to make a DVD.
Picking up his controller and playing the game, Uehara begins to discuss the
enemy artificial intelligence and how it is one of the last issues he has to
address. "It has really taken us three years to perfect the enemy movements so
they don't look robotic," he explains. But the fact remains that the enemies are
robots, and their complicated AI routines can easily break under certain
circumstances. "One of the last problems I'm dealing with involves the player
pressing a certain button on the control pad for half a second. If a player does
this at a certain point in the game, the enemy AI goes berserk and does not
respond properly." Uehara says that bug should be fixed soon; after that, the
game will almost be finished.
At his desk, Shinkawa puts the finishing touches on the game's environments--for
weeks he has been playing through the game to ensure the visuals are up to
snuff. "What I will do is stop the action every second during the game to make
sure things look just right," he says. "I will manipulate the position of models,
their colors, as well as the fog in real time. It's incredibly important because
it's really the lighting and the way it is applied that makes a scene look cool."
It is now 5:00 in the morning, and most of the final bugs have been hammered out;
Shinkawa finishes making his final adjustments to the look of the game's ending
sequence. Most importantly, Uehara finally feels confident enough that the game
is done. With a few keystrokes and mouse clicks he starts up the DVD-ROM burner
and begins making what will be the version of Metal Gear Solid 2 shipping to 1
million US consumers in a few weeks.
In some ways it is anticlimactic--three years of hard work by a team of 70 is
reduced to one silver disc. Uehara stands there watching the green LED light as
it flickers to indicate data being written to the DVD. Some of the other
employees stand around Uehara and watch--that is, those who haven't already
fallen asleep. What were figurative exclamation points above the programmers'
heads earlier in the day have turned into zigzagging Zs.
In the morning, the final version will be shipped off to the United States. They
finally did it. Metal Gear Solid 2 is gold.
Unlike the final days of development for most games, the completion of the US
version on September 28 was not the end of development for Metal Gear Solid 2--it
was only the first of three versions the team needed to complete. The next week,
they would begin work on the Japanese version, which would be completed in late
October. After that would be the European version, scheduled for release in
February 2002.
Still, all those around Kojima admit that he seems much more relaxed now that the
US version is on store shelves. In mid-October, Kojima attended the Tokyo Game
Show with Matsuhana and other members of the team. Scott Dolph, who acts as
Kojima's bodyguard at trade shows, drove Kojima and Matsuhana to TGS--taking
Japan's subway was not an option, given that Kojima is often accosted by
countless game fans en route to shows. "When I was driving Mr. Kojima to TGS this
year, I could tell that he was relieved to get out of the office," recalls
Dolph. "He really just seemed to start speaking like he never has before--he
seemed so relieved and excited that the US version was done."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You need to decide what is important to take away from the experience."
-Kojima on the game's message
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A few weeks after returning from TGS, Kojima still has a light cold--he says he
has been sick quite frequently since E3 this year. When asked to reflect on what
he hopes players will take away from the game now that they can play it, Kojima
avoids getting into any type of deep existential discussion. Even though there
are serious messages in the game about posterity, memories, privacy, and other
issues, Kojima says he doesn't want to further parse what he has expressed
through the game's dialogue. "In the game, Raiden asks Snake a few times, 'What
am I supposed to do?'" he points out. "And I made sure that Snake's response is
always, 'It's up for you to decide.' That is really the message I want to tell
players--you need to decide what is important for you to take away from the
experience."
Kojima says that Raiden will likely not appear in future Metal Gear games.
Some gamers will no doubt want to take away nothing more from the experience than
the hopes of another Metal Gear game coming sooner rather than later. On this
front Kojima has good news. "I really think that Metal Gear has to live on in
some form," he confesses. "But as I said at the end of Metal Gear Solid, I really
think it is time for me to hand the director role over to someone else. I might
do the initial planning for the next game but not much more than that." As for
whether Raiden will return, Kojima doesn't think so. "Personally I think Raiden
is a onetime character," he says. "But if people love him I might reconsider."
To some it might seem shocking that Kojima is thinking of walking away from Metal
Gear. He says he has been thinking about his decision for a while and has been
consciously trying to prepare the team for his eventual exit. "Throughout this
project I have really tried to embody that theme of passing knowledge on to the
next generation," he says while reviewing the stack of idea notebooks for the
day. "These guys all have great ideas. Hopefully they can take what I have passed
on to them and blend it with their own values to create a whole new kind of Metal
Gear created by them, not me."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I'd love to do a game about family relationships and also start looking at doing
something online."
-Kojima on his future projects
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
coming from a man at the helm of such a successful game series, his comments seem
rather surprising. After all, why walk away from one of the biggest video game
franchises of all time? Isn't this the ultimate dream for an artist--to have his
work validated and respected by millions of gamers around the world? Perhaps not.
Just as little boys who like to play hide-and-seek know, the challenge of finding
a new spot to hide can sometimes be more appealing than sticking to that one good
spot you've used for years. Kojima sounds as if he's ready to find a new hiding
place. "I really do want to move on to do some new ideas and challenge myself,"
Kojima explains. "I'd love to do a game about family relationships and also start
looking at doing something online."
Hideo Kojima laughs when discussing whether he might return to direct Metal Gear
Solid 3.
So, does this mean that it's impossible he is going to come back for Metal Gear
Solid 3? Kojima laughs, knowing that he has dug himself into a hole. "Well, you
know what I think of saying something is impossible," he says with a sheepish
grin on his face. "I guess we will have to wait and see."
=====================
the end ain't it sad
=====================
thank you
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copyright 2001
(if any of the codes do not work please email me at [email protected] or
if you have any coments on my guide or if there is any thing you trhink sould be
in here thankyou)
ps:all cuss word have been took out due to kids.Hi little guy although i see it
strang a kid playing a m rated game :)
and people thinking i took somthing from there faq or about to take somthing from
mine
1.I PLAY BY THESE RULES
A.IAIN'T THAT KIND OF GUY
B.YOU AIN'T THAT KIND OF GUY
C.I DO ME OUN STUFF SO ALL HATE MAIL SAYING I RIPPED THERE FAQ WILL BE DELEATED
'CAUSE THIS TOOK ME A MONTH TO WITE:=
D.THIS IS A OVER 20 PAGE LONG FAQ!!!!!!!!!!!!
