For over two years now, dedicated Metal Gear Solid V (MGSV) players have been trying in vain to remove every nuclear weapon created by players on the game's online servers as part of an official, Konami-supported metagame . Both unofficial trackers and occasional, official updates from Konami show how difficult that effort has been, though, with hundreds or thousands of virtual weapons still sticking around into 2018 (depending on the platform and region).

So it came as no small surprise for PC MGSV players when they logged in to their Forward Operating Bases on Friday to see a cutscene announcing, "The last nuke's been decommissioned. It's over, Boss. I thought this day would never come."

The contents of the cutscene itself have been well-known since hackers discovered it lurking in the game's code back in 2015. But the sudden "official" unlocking on the PC servers was quite unexpected, especially since the last official count showed a significant 7,500 nukes still on the PC servers as of January 25 (though that number had been plummeting for weeks at the time).

The surprise in-game announcement sent parts of the MGSV community into a bit of a tizzy over the weekend. Some assumed Konami triggered the scene manually, tired of waiting for the players themselves to disarm ("Probably as a PR stunt before [Metal Gear] Survive hits the stores," one user wrote on the Steam forums). Another theory suggested trolls had hacked their own bases to have billions of nukes, leading to an integer overflow that caused the servers to mistakenly count to zero.

By Sunday, Konami was taking to Twitter to "confirm that the event was triggered while the nuke count hadn’t reached zero... We would like to apologize for the inconvenience and reassure you that we will investigate the matter as well as take the necessary action to avoid this in the future."

The quest for peace

Even if it was just a glitch, the cutscene trigger could bring new attention to groups like Reddit's Metal Gear Anti-Nuclear, which has been trying for months to organize players around stealing and disarming others players' nukes in-game. But with uncooperative players constantly equipping the powerful weapons to defend their bases, and some troll groups trying to stockpile weapons just to throw a wrench in the works, it has been an uphill battle. Some players have also laid out detailed complaints that certain players' nukes are impossible to disarm thanks to a seeming glitch in the server code.

Over the years, the disarming effort has taken on more than just philosophical import for some. A widespread rumor in the community suggests that Konami is waiting for disarmament before continuing the Metal Gear Solid V saga with a much-desired (but never officially announced) "Chapter 3: Peace."

Konami has fueled this fire to some extent, with a former community manager refusing to confirm what will happen upon disarmament and three cryptic three-themed tweets from series creator Hideo Kojima himself. With Kojima's public split from Konami and the company's new focus on the zombie-themed Metal Gear Survive , though, hopes for the release of a "lost" MSGV chapter might just be wishful thinking at this point.