CODEC
THE CHAIN
Big Boss to the Snakes to the Patriots. The lineage, drawn once, properly — the most-asked-for and most-badly-explained thing online.
Two chains run through Metal Gear, and almost every explanation online tangles them into one. The first is genetic — a bloodline manufactured in a lab. The second is ideological — a single dead woman's “will,” inherited and misread across three generations. They cross at exactly one man. They are not the same chain. Untangled:
The ideological chain — a will, misinterpreted
It starts at a grave in 1964. The Boss — Big Boss's mentor — is ordered to fake a defection and is then killed by her own student to bury an international incident. Her dream was a world no longer carved up by the Cold War's proxy borders. Everything downstream is an argument about what she actually meant.
Her student earns the title Big Boss by pulling the trigger, and reads her will as: soldiers should never again be spent and discarded by nations. That reading becomes a home for soldiers with no flag — Outer Heaven. But Zero (Major Zero), standing beside him, reads the same will as: the world must be unified and kept stable, by control if that's what it takes. With the recovered fortune of the Philosophers, Zero founds the Patriots — at first alongside Big Boss, EVA, Ocelot, Sigint and Para-Medic.
The two readings cannot coexist. Big Boss walks, and the friendship curdles into the war at the centre of the whole series. (Same source, opposite conclusions — the exact shape of the localisation split over on 141.80, if you want the rhyme.) And the Patriots outlive their founder's body: Zero's project hardens into a network of AIs — GW, JD and others, several named for US presidents — running the “System” on their own by the time of Sons of Liberty and Guns of the Patriots. Control with no-one left at the controls. The will, now executing on machines.
The genetic chain — Les Enfants Terribles
1972. To manufacture Big Boss's heir, the Patriots clone him. Project Les Enfants Terribles produces Solid Snake (David), Liquid Snake (Eli), and Solidus Snake (George Sears) — the “perfect” third.
Liquid was engineered to carry Big Boss's recessive traits and Solid his dominant ones — and Liquid was led to believe that made him the inferior brother. That belief is the engine of his rage. But it rests on a slippage the series never cleanly owns: dominant and recessive describe which traits express, not which brother is “better.” The confusion is baked in by the original Japanese, where the words for dominant and recessive (優性 / 劣性) literally carry “superior / inferior” connotations — so Liquid rages at a genetic hierarchy that may not exist. Read strictly, there's a real case he was the more capable Snake all along. Nature as one more fabricated context.
Solidus, the balanced clone, becomes President of the United States and then the man at the heart of the Big Shell. Solid Snake spends the series dismantling what his own template built — and Guns of the Patriots ages him into the mentor's chair, closing the loop.
Where the two chains meet
Big Boss is the hinge — the ideological chain's first inheritor and the genetic chain's template. The Patriots weaponise both: his body into sons, his mentor's words into a control system. The last move of the saga collapses them together. The Patriots' AI network is torn down at last — the real aim of Ocelot's long con — and Big Boss returns to end Zero himself, then, standing over The Boss's grave, finally says she was never asking for any of this. The chain ends where it began: at a grave, with a survivor deciding what the dead were owed.
The games are the primary text: Snake Eater (1964, The Boss); Metal Gear Solid (Les Enfants Terribles, the gene reveal); Sons of Liberty & Guns of the Patriots (the Patriots' AIs and the resolution). Every reading marked “interpretation” above is argument, not established fact.
THE JAPANESE TRACK
The performances the English-speaking fandom never heard. Liquid, Snake, Raiden — a growing collection of takes, in Miles’ own voice.
This is a record of takes, not a wiki. The opinions here are Miles'; the actors and the reception around them are independently sourced; and where a reading reaches for something bigger than the evidence, it's marked as interpretation and left open. The line he keeps returning to: the Japanese cast plays Metal Gear closer to jidaigeki — samurai-drama register — where the English cast plays it as action cinema. Start with the voice that makes the case.
Liquid Snake — 銀河万丈 (Banjo Ginga) vs Cam Clarke
“his performance is impressive and a different vibe to what most English-speaking fans think of Liquid Snake.”
— Miles
Who Ginga is. One of anime's great orators. His signature role is Gihren Zabi in Mobile Suit Gundam — a character written as a Hitler analogue, whose funeral-turned-rally speech is among the most famous in the medium. In a 2019 fan poll of his roles, Gihren placed first and Liquid placed second: Japanese fans pair the two performances themselves. Casting the franchise's grandiose, will-of-the-strong warlord to that voice — an actor whose signature role is a demagogue — is a signal on its own.
TVTropes files Liquid under Large Ham and Evil Is Hammy; his signature beat is screaming “BROTHER!” When Guns of the Patriots dropped the accent, fans mourned “the dramatic British accent.” Adored — as spectacle.
The pixiv encyclopedia entry is wall-to-wall reverence: an “overwhelming presence,” still rated by many the series' finest final boss. No camp framing anywhere in the JP fan writing.
Why they diverged — on the record. Metal Gear Solid's sole English translator, Jeremy Blaustein, rewrote and punched up the script — “one must take liberties” — and Kojima judged he'd gone too far, tightening localisation policy for every game after. So it isn't “same script, two performances.” It's same source text, two scripts, two performances — the divergence is layered.
Whether that gap is wide enough to make the two versions different genres — MGS1-as-tragedy in Japanese, MGS1-as-action-cinema in English — is a hypothesis, not a fact, and not Miles' claim. It's something to test against scene-by-scene listening, with his ears as the judge, and to drop without ceremony if the audio doesn't sustain it. What isn't in question: the definitive performance of English gaming's most beloved villain is, in Japanese, a straight dramatic read — and most of the EN fandom has never heard it.
Solid Snake — 大塚明夫 (Akio Ōtsuka) vs David Hayter
“Snake himself isn't so much gruff in Japanese as Hayter makes him but smooth and deep as if he's bellowing his lines from his chest in that typical samurai way rather than catching in the throat like a growl.”
— Miles
The actors. Akio Ōtsuka in Japanese — a fixture of the deep, resonant leading-man register. David Hayter in English, whose gravel became, for a generation of Western players, the literal sound of Snake. Two schools of the same masculine cool.
The distinction, in Miles' terms: chest vs throat. Ōtsuka bellows from the chest — resonance, control, a period-drama gravity. Hayter catches it in the throat — effortful, a growl, closer to a hardboiled action lead. It's the whole section's thesis in two words: jidaigeki register against action-movie register, heard in one character.
Raiden — 堀内賢雄 (Kenyu Horiuchi) vs Quinton Flynn
“Raiden also has a baritone, more heroic and respectable voice in Japanese than in English.”
— Miles
The actors. Kenyu Horiuchi in Japanese; Quinton Flynn in English. In Japanese Raiden carries a baritone that reads as creditable and heroic from the first line; the English performance pitches him lighter and greener. There's support for the take from an unexpected direction: Kojima has credited Horiuchi's performance for part of Raiden's popularity in Japan — a warmth the character, by his own account, never found in the West.
Raiden was the most divisive protagonist the series ever handed the West — much of that was simply that he wasn't Snake. But the lighter English read gave his detractors more to push against, and framing his long rehabilitation (Sons of Liberty → Guns of the Patriots → Rising) partly as a voice story is Miles' angle — and one almost nobody tells.
Reception is documented per side, in each fandom's own words — TVTropes (Characters/MetalGearSolid); the pixiv encyclopedia (リキッド・スネーク); the Animate Times 2019 Ginga-roles poll (Gihren 1st, Liquid 2nd); the Blaustein localisation account (Den of Geek / Polygon); and the Raiden casting + Kojima's comment on Horiuchi (Metal Gear Wiki / Wikipedia). No source makes the cross-language comparison itself — that observation, and the fact that the EN fandom has never heard the JP Liquid, is the original contribution here. More takes (Ocelot, The Boss, Otacon) will land as Miles re-listens.
THE MSX PROBLEM
What’s canon in MG1/MG2, what Kojima retconned, what the NES port broke, and why Snake’s Revenge exists and doesn’t count.
Four games have a claim on Metal Gear before 1998. Two of them are Metal Gear. The West mostly played the other two.
That is the whole problem, and nearly every account of it online gets at least one detail wrong — usually a detail that makes the story tidier than it was. The file, then.
The originals — MSX2, 1987 and 1990
Metal Gear shipped for the MSX2 on 13 July 1987 in Japan, with an English version in Europe the same year and no North American release at all. It was Hideo Kojima's first game as director. Its sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990), was Japan-only, and stayed that way for fifteen years.
These two are the canon. Everything the later series treats as history happened here: Outer Heaven and Operation Intrude N313; Zanzibar Land and Operation Intrude F014; Big Boss as the commander behind both, and then as the man Snake kills at the end of the second game — hand to hand, with a cigarette lighter and a can of lacquer spray.
One detail worth having straight, because it gets misremembered in both directions. In the first game the TX-55 never fights you: it's inert and unfinished, and you bring it down by placing sixteen plastic explosives on its feet in an order Dr. Pettrovich gives you, while the only things shooting are a pair of gun cameras. In Metal Gear 2, Metal Gear D shoots back — piloted by Gray Fox, throwing heat-seeking missiles, killed with grenades to the legs. The through-line isn't that you can't fight the machine. It's that both machines come apart at the legs.
The demake — what the NES version broke, and why
The Famicom version arrived 22 December 1987, five months after the original; North America got it as the NES Metal Gear in June 1988. It was made by a different Konami division in Tokyo, working from the original's source code — per the documented account, “without the consent of the original team.” Kojima's involvement: none.
What it changed is well known. Why is the part that gets skipped, and the two most-cited changes have two entirely different causes — programmer Masahiro Ueno has given both:
The jungle infiltration replacing the MSX2's approach by water was differentiation, not design: “Management wanted to differentiate the Famicom version” now that the MSX2 game had already shipped. The team had three months.
Metal Gear never appearing on screen was “simply due to the hardware limitations” — Ueno reckons the robot was implementable with a better mapper chip, which they didn't have.
So the NES version's famous crime — you infiltrate Outer Heaven and the thing you finally blow up is a supercomputer — was not a creative decision. It was a memory mapper.
And it's routinely overstated in the retelling: the Metal Gear is never on screen, but it is not written out. Pettrovich still sends Snake after the supercomputer because it controls the weapon. The mech is off-stage, not deleted. Ueno's summary of the author's verdict is the one worth quoting: Kojima “does not think the NES version is an authentic Metal Gear.”
The impostor — Snake’s Revenge
1990, NES, North America and Europe, never Japan. Not a bootleg and not an outside studio: an in-house Konami production, made in Japan by Konami staff — some of whom had worked on the MSX2 original — and aimed squarely at a Western audience that had only ever met Metal Gear through the demake. Published in North America under the Ultra Games label.
It is also, indirectly, the reason Metal Gear 2 exists. Kojima has recounted a train ride in Tokyo where he ran into a colleague from Konami's Famicom division who was working on the game. He hadn't known it existed. The colleague, he says, told him the Snake in it was “not the authentic Snake” and asked him to make a real sequel.
It is Kojima's own account, given in a 2005 interview — fifteen years after the fact, single-sourced, with the details drifting between retellings, and the staffer never publicly named. Repeat it as a thing he has said, which it is; not as a documented event, which it isn't. What is not in doubt is the output: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake shipped that year.
What “non-canon” actually means here
This is where most explanations go slack. Both NES games sit outside the continuity — but not in the same way, and the difference is the whole point:
- The NES Metal Gear is a non-canonical adaptation of canonical events. Operation Intrude N313 happened. Outer Heaven happened. This is a corrupted retelling of them.
- Snake's Revenge is a non-canonical sequel to events that never occurred at all. Nothing in it happened.
One is a bad translation of history. The other is apocrypha. Lumping them together is the single most common error in this corner of the lore.
Stated more confidently online than the record supports: no formal declaration from Konami or Kojima Productions has been found declaring either game canon or non-canon. The status is fan consensus plus structural signals. The strongest of those signals is recent — Master Collection Vol. 1 (October 2023) includes both NES games, but quarantined in a separate application labelled Bonus Content, while the MSX2 originals sit in the main line-up beside MGS1–3. Preservation, not canonisation. That is as close to an official position as anyone has put in writing.
On availability, for completeness: Subsistence (Japan, December 2005; the West, 2006) put the MSX2 games in Western hands officially for the first time and gave Metal Gear 2 its first official English localisation. They travelled again inside the HD Collection, and again in Master Collection Vol. 1.
Myths worth correcting
- “The series started on the NES.” It started on MSX2, five months earlier, made by the team the port went around.
- “I feel asleep” / “the truck have started to move”. NES localisation only. Not in Kojima's game. The most misattributed lines in the franchise.
- “Vermon CaTaffy is Metal Gear's villain.” He exists in the NES manual and on the box — a Konami America invention — and appears nowhere in the game, nor in the Japanese Famicom manual. The commander of Outer Heaven is Big Boss.
- “The MSX2 games were Japan-only until Subsistence.” True of Metal Gear 2. Not true of the first game, which had a 1987 European release in English.
- “Snake's Revenge was a bootleg.” In-house Konami, made in Japan, built for the West.
- “Kojima hates Snake's Revenge.” He has been inconsistent on the record — “faithful to the Metal Gear concept” in one interview, “somewhat of a crappy game” at GDC 2009, and not a bad game to Nintendo Power later. Pick a quote and you can make him say anything.
- “You never fight a Metal Gear in the MSX games.” You fight Metal Gear D, and it fights back. See below — this one nearly got past us.
The tempting argument is that the MSX games are the only Metal Gear games actually about Metal Gear — that from 1998 on the walking nuke becomes a boss and a MacGuffin while the real subject shifts to genes, memes and information. There's something in it, but the strong version does not survive the games themselves: in Metal Gear 2 you fight the machine directly and beat it by force. The version that holds is narrower — in MG1 and MG2 the weapon is the mission objective rather than an obstacle on the way to one. You infiltrate in order to destroy it; it is the thing in the title. Whether the series' name is a fossil of a subject it left behind is an argument — and it is this page's argument, not Miles'.
The games are the primary text. Dates, development and release facts: the Wikipedia entries for Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Snake's Revenge, and Konami's own Master Collection listing. The port's development, and both Ueno quotes, come from his interview at Hardcore Gaming 101. The train anecdote traces to a 2005 Kojima interview and is flagged above as his account rather than as record. Every claim marked interpretation is argument, not established fact — and where the canon simply has no official answer, this page says so rather than inventing one.
THE TANGLE
1964 to 2018, four parallel tracks — fiction order, release order, canon status, which Snake is on screen. The retcon-status track is new.
transmission incoming — essay in buildGENE / MEME / SCENE / SENSE
Kojima named the series’ themes himself — gene, meme, scene, sense, and two more links most people never quote. Where that chain actually ends.
transmission incoming — essay in buildYOU ARE BEING WATCHED
Where production reality became canon. Some frequencies answer when you least expect them.
transmission incoming — essay in build