Back in 2001, Gamers Battled Fake News — In ‘Metal Gear Solid 2’

A ground-breaking video game predicted our present reality

by AJAI RAJ

Before the 2016 election, before “fake news,” before social media — there was Metal Gear Solid 2.

Perhaps the most widely anticipated game in video game history at the time of its release in November 2001, the PS2 title was the sequel to Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation.

MGS’s heady blend of stealth action, authentic weaponry, neat gadgets and commentary on post-Cold War geopolitics and the implications of genetic engineering rightly earned it a spot in the pantheon of all-time great games, and one of the first games people think of when they make the case for video games as art.

MGS2 shifted away from the original’s focus on genetics and nuclear weaponry, instead providing not only commentary, but an interactive and at times jarring lesson about the perils and pitfalls of discerning truth from fiction in an increasingly digital world.

Much could— and indeed, has— been written and said about the themes of MGS2, enough to fill multiple books, if not an entire encyclopedia. Creator Hideo Kojima famously stated that he intended to “betray” his fans, albeit in a pleasant way.

The game is now older than many of its fans were at the time of its release, and diehard Metal Gear aficionados are still arguing about how “pleasant” that betrayal really was.

Not only did it involve a bait-and-switch from playing as beloved MGS protagonist Solid Snake to the effete, whiny and poorly acted rookie Raiden, but it also included a bisexual vampire, a woman who bullets simply couldn’t hit and a jolly demolitions expert drinking wine through a bendy straw and skating around on rollerblades.

In the years since its release, it’s been argued that MGS2 was a postmodern masterpiece, and that the events of the entire game may have taken place in a virtual reality simulation. One devoted soul wrote a nearly 150-page paper about the characters, themes and events of the game and their real-world correlates, which are more numerous than one might imagine.

But I want to focus on one theme in particular — that of information, and how the information we’re given circumscribes the context in which we think and act, even as we imagine ourselves to be independent actors with free will.

MGS2 drives this lesson home in a way that makes it impossible to ignore. Not merely through walls of text and long cut-scenes — both of which also abound in the game — but through the way the player interacts with the game itself.

At a certain point in the story, Solid Snake, the hard-bitten super-soldier who’s been assisting Raiden/the player in proceeding with his increasingly dubious mission, turns on Raiden and hands him over to the enemy for torture, and from there the game descends into a kind of inspired madness, warping into a meta-commentary on gaming and media and challenging the player’s own motivations and agency.

At this point, a brief synopsis is in order. The original MGS comprised an incident at a fictional, top-secret military base called Shadow Moses, an island off the coast of Alaska where a game-changing weapon called Metal Gear REX was being developed.

A bipedal, nuclear-equipped battle tank capable of launching a nuclear strike from anywhere in the world, Metal Gear REX was a terrorist’s dream. And indeed, terrorists had infiltrated Shadow Moses with the intention of stealing and activating REX.

Hero Solid Snake was sent in to rescue a couple of hostages and disable REX. In the process, he ended up defeating his twin brother, Liquid Snake, and learning that both he and Liquid, along with the entire terrorist army Snake had been fighting, were genetic clones of Big Boss, the ultimate soldier.

In the game’s post-credits sequence, the player learns that one of the villains, Revolver Ocelot, has been secretly working for the president of the United States the whole time to orchestrate the terrorist plot. Confused yet? Hold on.

MGS2 begins four years after the Shadow Moses incident, on an oil tanker making its way up the Hudson river, off the coast of Manhattan. Solid Snake, since Shadow Moses, has become an anti-Metal Gear activist. Since Revolver Ocelot sold the specs for REX on the black market, Metal Gears are a dime a dozen.