A rogue developer (or developers) appears to have hidden a message in Metal Gear Survive

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Right after you're prompted to enter your name at the beginning of Survive's campaign, you'll see it added to a clipboard among a group of other military code-names. Eagle eyed users on both Reddit and Twitter have noticed that if you take the first letter of each of the last names on that page, it spells out "KJP Forever", which could be interpreted as "Kojima Productions Forever" (with a break between the P and the F for the player's custom name).Underneath that, two of the names with particularly negative connotations -"Bastard Yota" and "Cunning Yuji"- share the same first names as Survive's director Yota Tsutsumizaki and producer Yuji Korekado. Both are listed as "AWOL."Ouch.Going a little deeper, if you take the first letters of the last names of 'Iron Marlin' and 'Dire Gibbon', you get 'MG' - or 'Metal Gear'. Both soldiers are, tragically, listed as 'KIA'.Here's a screenshot taken from our first 19 minutes In case you've lived under a rock your whole life, Hideo Kojima is the creator of Metal Gear and his studio Kojima Productions developed the series under publisher Konami until 2015, when Konami controversially terminated Kojima's contract and disbanded the studio. Metal Gear Survive has nothing to do with Kojima, who is now focused on his next game, Death Stranding.In the meantime, Metal Gear Survive has recently caused some controversy by charging players $10 USD to open a new save slot if you don't want to delete your existing character. In our review of the game we celebrated its often compelling gameplay loop but mourned the loss of the series' soul.

Lucy O'Brien is Games & Entertainment Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her on Twitter.