There is a particular kind of memory that survives without keeping an accurate calendar. I can picture a friend's house in Montefiore delle Marche, the television, a PlayStation, the sensation of an unfamiliar game asking me to pay attention to things I had never considered part of a game before. I tend to place it around 1997 or 1998, because that is where the feeling belongs in my childhood. The dates suggest it must have been a little later. Metal Gear Solid arrived in Europe, including Italy, on 26 February 1999. My memory has evidently compressed the marketing, the conversations and the moment of actually playing it. I am comfortable with that. The precise year matters to a retrospective, but the experience matters more. My friend Mario had been telling me about this thing called Metal Gear, and when I went to his house, I encountered a different idea of what a PlayStation game could be.
It is difficult to describe the effect without making the original Metal Gear Solid sound more mysterious than it was. There was a soldier, a base, guards, weapons, cameras and a mission. Plenty of games had some version of those elements. What I remember is the impression that the environment knew I was there. A guard could notice something, the alarm could erupt, and suddenly a little symbol and the radar in the top-right corner became as dramatic as anything on the main screen. That alert state felt almost indecently alive. The game had its own procedures, its own surveillance apparatus, its own way of responding to a ten-year-old boy who was trying to work out the rules. It fascinated me that detection itself was a kind of event.
THE WALL IN MONTEFIORE
The sequence I can still see most vividly is the armoury, where we were trying to locate the hidden entrance to Kenneth Baker, the president of ArmsTech. Memory occasionally substitutes the DARPA chief for him, because the two hostages are entangled in the opening hours. But it was Baker who waited beyond the concealed walls, and C4 that allowed us to get there. We were inspecting surfaces for subtle differences, placing explosives and discovering that a wall which looked like scenery could actually be opened. Beyond it was another wall, and eventually Ocelot and that extraordinary hostage situation. The act of placing C4 made the room feel physical. It taught me that the answer could be embedded in the architecture, that observation was as useful as reflex, and that a game could make a seemingly ordinary texture feel loaded with intention.
Mario eventually lent me the game. I played it at home in Montefiore, and another small miracle followed. A character told me that the frequency for contacting Meryl could be found on the back of the CD case. This sounded like a clue belonging to the fictional world, until it became apparent that it meant the actual object in my possession. I was meant to pick up the plastic case and look at the printed screenshot, where 140.15 was hiding in plain sight. The fiction had reached into my room. It was funny, slightly disorienting and enormously elegant. I do not think I had the vocabulary then to describe a fourth-wall break, but I understood the thrill of having my assumptions quietly rearranged.
THE GAME BEFORE THE GAME
By the time Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty began appearing in magazines, I had entered a new form of anticipation. I had been excited about other games, of course. Banjo-Kazooie belonged to that bright late-1990s imaginative world, and Final Fantasy IX and the Final Fantasy film were things I followed with interest. I had remembered Kojima’s name ever since Mario’s PlayStation. Sons of Liberty may have been the first game I distinctly remember awaiting as an event in itself. The distinction is personal: I was no longer encountering a game someone had brought home; I was deliberately trying to discover what a game would be before it existed in my hands. A release date could alter the texture of a year.
There was a PSM magazine feature that became almost a private artefact. I remember the comic-book quality of the imagery, Solid Snake and Olga, and above all the silhouettes. I have not been able to identify the exact issue with enough confidence to assign it a number, and I would rather preserve the memory than attach the wrong cover to it. What is unmistakable is how many times I read those pages. I examined the small screenshots, returned to the captions and studied the drawings as though a new detail might emerge from the paper if I looked carefully enough. These were not pristine digital images. They were reproductions, with the limitations of print and the roughness of the screen captures still visible. That grain was part of the invitation. It left spaces for the imagination to occupy.
Yoji Shinkawa was central to that experience, although I learned to distinguish his name from Kojima's more clearly over time. His character drawings were loose and exact at once, capable of suggesting weight, fabric, metal and attitude with remarkably few lines. The silhouettes were particularly formative. He would withhold something, leave a contour unfinished, let the black ink dissolve into white paper, and the image somehow became more convincing. In a 2001 interview, Shinkawa described starting with rapid brush-pen sketches rather than meticulous finished drawings. Konami's own retrospective interview reveals that he sometimes used photocopies to give images a rough, almost mineral texture. That is an obscure little fact I love, because it explains why his work felt so alive on those magazine pages. The apparent finish was not always the objective. Energy was.
I was drawing character ideas of my own, and those pages altered the way I thought a character could be introduced. I began to value the gesture, the fall of a coat, the angle of a face partly concealed, the strange dignity of a standing silhouette. Shinkawa gave me permission to draft. I did not need to solve every anatomical question before an idea could be communicated. The half-formed image could be the strongest one, provided its shape and intention were right. Even now, when I look at some of my early sketches, I can see the attraction of those dark, searching lines. It is one of the most direct connections between a work I admired as a child and the visual language I continue to build for myself.
RETURNING TO AUSTRALIA, ENTERING THE BIG SHELL
My proper experience of Sons of Liberty belongs to my early years back in Australia. Montefiore was behind me. Canberra was the new setting, and the shift between countries carried its own confusion. I was trying to understand an environment that was familiar in some respects and profoundly strange in others. That is partly why I remember the change from Snake to Raiden so strongly. It was a jolt within a jolt, a game changing the terms of its identity while I was working through a change in my own. I would not pretend the two experiences were equivalent. One was a fictional decision; the other was a childhood relocation. But the emotional association is real, and time has made it stronger.
The prologue delivers exactly the adventure I had been promised. Snake arrives on the tanker; Olga Gurlukovich introduces herself as a memorable adversary; the new Metal Gear RAY emerges as something sleek, amphibious and almost animal. The ship is invaded, an apparent catastrophe follows, and Snake is publicly blamed. Two years later, the game starts again at an offshore environmental facility called the Big Shell, constructed after an oil spill near Manhattan. A newcomer named Raiden arrives to rescue hostages from a terrorist group calling itself the Sons of Liberty. Snake is supposedly dead. The player has to learn an unfamiliar protagonist while the story keeps scattering reminders of the earlier game around him.
I still regard that as one of the largest narrative swings in the medium. Imagine The Empire Strikes Back advertising Luke Skywalker, opening with Luke in an exhilarating sequence, and then spending most of its running time following a completely new person who has been trained to regard Luke as a legend. It would have been outrageous. Kojima did something like that in an interactive work in which identification with the protagonist is built into the controls. It was commercially risky and, for some players, infuriating. It also gave the game its argument. In a 2012 discussion, Kojima explained that a novice character allowed newcomers to learn the world while Snake remained a figure of almost untouchable competence. As Raiden, we could look at Snake the way Raiden looked at him, with admiration, uncertainty and an increasing suspicion that legends are made from incomplete information.
The Big Shell is an inspired setting, partly because it is ridiculous when described plainly. Its enormous struts, connecting bridges, industrial rooms, orange surfaces and open ocean suggest both a real engineering project and an architectural dream. It is a stage divided into discrete compartments, each with its own atmosphere and tactical problem. The terrorists are theatrical: Fatman turns bomb disposal into performance; Fortune moves through gunfire as though reality itself has made an exception for her; Vamp is a dancer, a predator and something close to an apparition. Meanwhile there are codec calls, hostages, security systems, a bomb expert who cannot be trusted, and scientific explanations so elaborate that the normal espionage story begins to buckle. Kojima's particular gift is allowing this to remain military science fiction while pushing it towards surrealism.
Vamp especially took hold of me. His movement fascinated me as much as his role in the plot. I wanted to move like that character, and I remember practising Vamp-like gestures and motions, trying to reproduce the impossible assurance of the way he carried himself. In retrospect it seems amusing, but I take the impulse seriously. A fictional character had crossed the boundary from something I watched into something I tried to embody. The game also left a physical trace in my own fiction. In Quantumyth, my story The Entity explores the experience of a being whose perspective is unlike our own. One of the visual impulses behind it was the sensation of traversing connected structures, gliding across struts and moving through a world that recalls the Big Shell's improbable geography. It is a transformation of an influence, rather than an attempt to borrow Kojima's setting. That is how lasting inspirations tend to work.
WHEN THE STORY BEGAN TO LOOK BACK
The plot eventually reveals that the Big Shell is not the environmental facility it appears to be. Its visible structure conceals Arsenal Gear, a colossal mobile fortress bound up with the Patriots, a clandestine system exerting influence over politics and information. Raiden's mission has been stage-managed. President Johnson, Olga, Solidus Snake, Ocelot and the various intermediaries are caught in different layers of coercion, secrecy and competing objectives. Emma Emmerich's attempt to disable the controlling AI offers one possible route out of the machinery, but even the apparent successes become uncertain. The narrative keeps asking who is giving orders, whose memories can be trusted, and whether the player has mistaken obedience for agency.
The genius is that these questions are formal as well as thematic. Raiden receives instructions through the codec, just as Snake did in the first game, but the supposedly reliable Colonel begins to come apart. The familiar interface starts delivering nonsense, including the wonderfully alarming demand, 'I need scissors! 61!' At the time, it genuinely frightened and bewildered me. The voice that had been organising my actions was apparently malfunctioning. Instructions arrived stripped of context. The game's operating structure, something I had accepted without thinking for hours, suddenly behaved like an intruder. I knew it was a game, of course. That did not make the feeling less unpleasant. The fiction seemed to be speaking from somewhere it should not have been able to reach.
Underneath the joke and the horror is the game's argument about information. The apparent explanation for the operation, the Solid Snake Simulation, gives way to the deeper S3 Plan, Selection for Societal Sanity. The Patriots' AI describes a civilisation producing more material than people can meaningfully evaluate, where trivialities persist, prejudices repeat themselves, and communities form around self-confirming versions of reality. A mechanism for selecting, organising and controlling information is presented as the answer. I do not agree with that answer, and neither should a player leave the game treating its villains as reliable philosophers. The unnerving part is the diagnosis and the seduction of the proposed solution. When public discourse is noisy and incoherent, the promise of someone or something editing reality can sound dangerously attractive.
In 2001 and 2002, those scenes felt like an intoxicating science-fiction complication. In 2026, they are difficult to separate from the internet in which we live. Feeds shape what we encounter, recommendation systems select the material that reaches us, and enormous archives preserve things that earlier generations might have allowed to disappear. People can spend whole days exchanging reactions to reactions, rarely meeting the underlying event. Artificial intelligence adds another layer, but I think the game is commonly described too narrowly as an AI prediction. Kojima has said much the same in recent discussion: the subject was digital society, the way data could accumulate and take on an apparent will, and what would happen to human judgement in those conditions. The fact that the game uses an AI to dramatise that argument is only one part of its enduring relevance. It did not literally predict every platform or business model that followed.
The final exchange with Snake has stayed with me more than any neat exposition of the conspiracy. He encourages Raiden to choose what he will pass on, rather than allowing the structures around him to determine his identity. In a story crowded with genetic inheritance, military programming, fabricated mentors and manipulated records, it is an appeal to personal responsibility. That idea mattered to me as a young player, although I probably understood it first as a feeling of release. It still matters now. The game did not make me independent by itself. But it reinforced the notion that thinking for oneself is an activity, a discipline, something that must be practised even when the surrounding machinery offers convenient answers.
OCELOT, RAY AND THE DETAILS THAT REMAIN
There is also the physical history of my affection for the game. I remember wanting the Todd McFarlane Revolver Ocelot figure, and I eventually obtained it. I wanted Metal Gear RAY as well, and my memory of finding or arranging to get that one leads back to Canberra, to an order or a shop whose details I can no longer firmly reconstruct. The 2001 McFarlane line included Snake, Raiden, Olga, Ocelot, Fortune and Solidus, with pieces that could be combined into a bonus RAY. That is a small piece of collecting history which explains how the machine belonged to the same material world as the individual characters. The action figures made the strange universe tactile, an extension of the old pleasure of handling the PlayStation case in Montefiore.
There are other production details I enjoy even more now than I did then. The original game's development publicity relied on the tanker footage to protect Raiden's identity. Shinkawa recalled creating some early Snake artwork specifically for the game's 2000 E3 unveiling. In an interview about his art book, he said a particular Ocelot illustration for the magazine Edge began as a drawing only about five by eight centimetres before being enlarged and processed. Metal Gear Solid 2 also recorded dog-tag names belonging to members of the production staff and people who entered Konami campaigns. That mixture of gigantic ambition and peculiar handmade detail feels typical of the work. A huge technological production was full of personal marks, in-jokes, drawing experiments and hidden acknowledgements. Even the little physical interactions, like shooting an ice bucket, suggested extraordinary attention to detail.
The game's ending also carries the imprint of the real world. In the final months of development, the September 11 attacks forced the team to reconsider material depicting destruction in Manhattan. Contemporary reporting from the developers confirms last-minute changes were made. Some planned imagery associated with Arsenal Gear's arrival in the city was removed. The fact that a game so preoccupied with the manufacture and circulation of information was itself altered by a historical event of such magnitude is difficult to contemplate without feeling the closeness of those two worlds. Sons of Liberty belongs to the atmosphere immediately before and after that rupture, even for those of us who played it a little later.
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ON
As we mark twenty-five years since the North American release of Sons of Liberty in November 2001, I feel unusually protective of its strangeness. A recent Kinda Funny Top 100 placed it at number 27. It sits firmly in my own top ten, and I ought to make that complete top 100 of mine one day. Rankings are a pleasant excuse to revisit the reasons a work stays with us. My reasons are scattered across two countries, a borrowed disc, a magazine worn down by rereading, drawings I made as a boy, an action figure and the afterlife of a fictional offshore facility in my own work. They cannot be reduced to a score.
My relationship with Kojima has continued through other games and other expectations. Before Death Stranding, I imagined something almost Kubrickian, an existential journey that might leave more of its mysteries open. There is extraordinary imagery and imagination in the finished games, but I have sometimes been disappointed by the return to weapons and familiar forms of conflict. That is my preference rather than a verdict on the work. It has helped me understand what kind of Kojima story reaches me most directly. I am especially drawn to the point where military procedure collides with philosophical anxiety, and where a disciplined science-fiction premise allows an extravagant, almost hallucinatory idea to enter the room. He is an espionage storyteller, but also a military surrealist.
That is why PHYSINT interests me so much. Kojima Productions confirmed in September 2026 that Bill Skarsgård would lead the new action-espionage project, alongside an announced cast including Charlee Fraser, Don Lee and Minami Hamabe. The presence of Shinkawa in its design lineage and Kojima's stated desire to revisit espionage make it feel like a distant descendant of the sensibility that produced Sons of Liberty. I am excited for the A24 Death Stranding film as a separate experiment, and for the Metal Gear Solid film being developed at Sony with directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein. Neither needs to recreate my childhood to justify itself. I would simply like to see the peculiar intelligence of this world reach people through new forms.
Konami's 2025 remake of Snake Eater has also made it easier to imagine a restored Sons of Liberty. As of this writing there has been no official announcement of such a remake, so my certainty is emotional rather than contractual. If it happens, I will play it, and I expect the experience to be moving in ways that go well beyond refreshed graphics. Nintendo's new Ocarina of Time remake has just made a similar return to 1998 possible. These works used to be things I anticipated as a child; now they can reappear as objects that measure the distance travelled since then. There is a particular tenderness in that, and perhaps a risk of asking the past to perform miracles twice. I would rather go back with curiosity than demand exactly the same feeling.
Kojima and Konami parted ways in 2015, more than a decade ago. I hope there can eventually be a warmer accommodation between them, although the history is not mine to settle and the people who make these games deserve credit beyond the most famous name. What I want preserved is the appetite for audacity: the courage to replace the hero, to make the interface untrustworthy, to put an argument about culture inside a stealth game, and to let a player finish with more questions than answers. I am grateful to Konami for keeping the games available, to Shinkawa for lines I still see when I close my eyes, and to Kojima for making something that I once encountered in a friend's house and have never quite left behind.
Somewhere in this story there is still Mario's PlayStation in Montefiore delle Marche. We are looking at a wall and wondering where to put the C4. The radar changes; the alarm goes off; a little symbol appears in the corner of the screen. At the time I was impressed because the game seemed to know what I had done. Twenty-five years after Sons of Liberty, I am drawn to it because it asks the question that follows from that first surprise: what happens when the systems watching us begin deciding what we are allowed to know? For all its extravagant conspiracies and extraordinary characters, the answer it leaves me with is modest and difficult. Notice what is happening. Question the instructions. Choose what to carry forward.
RESEARCH NOTES AND SOURCES
Chronology checked against publisher records: the original Metal Gear Solid arrived in Europe on 26 February 1999; Sons of Liberty arrived there on 8 March 2002. The first encounter in Montefiore is therefore described as a recollection most likely dating from 1999. The specific PSM preview has not been securely identified. As of 14 November 2026, Konami has not announced a Sons of Liberty remake. Personal memories and interpretations belong to the author.
01 Konami, Metal Gear Solid (Italian product page; European release date)
02 Konami, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (European release date)
03 Konami, Yoji Shinkawa interview, Part 1
04 Konami, Yoji Shinkawa interview, Part 2
05 Shmuplations, Yoji Shinkawa 2001 interview translation
06 BAFTA, Hideo Kojima 2012 Annual Games Lecture
07 GameSpot, The Final Hours of Metal Gear Solid 2
08 Figure Realm, McFarlane Metal Gear Solid 2 figure checklist
09 Konami, Metal Gear Solid 2 dog-tag manual
10 Kojima Productions, PHYSINT casting announcement, September 2026
11 Variety Australia, Metal Gear Solid film directors, April 2026
12 Kojima Productions, A24 Death Stranding film partnership
13 Konami, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater launch, August 2025
14 Nintendo Australia, Ocarina of Time remake release, November 2026
15 Kinda Funny Top 100, 2026 countdown compilation
16 GamesRadar, Kojima on digital society and Metal Gear Solid 2, 2026
