Despite several re-issues of Hideo Kojima’s influential stealth action series Metal Gear Solid over the years, a persistent omission has kept modern fans from experiencing the entirety of Solid Snake’s decade-spanning espionage saga. Some 16 years later, however, it sounds like Konami is ready to rectify this problem in the next volume of its new Master Collection series.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots may finally be coming to PC and modern consoles, according to Konami producer Noriaki Okamura. If the publisher makes good on this, it will mark the first time the game will be available on hardware that isn’t nearly two decades old.
“We definitely are aware of this situation with MGS4,” Okamura told IGN. “Unfortunately we can't really say too much at the moment with Vol. 1 containing MGS 1-3 dot dot dot… you can probably connect the dots!”
While the name of 2023’s Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 heavily implied the existence of a follow-up volume, Okamura comments are the closest thing to confirmation players have had about it. Last year, a self-proclaimed Metal Gear historian shared that Konami’s Master Collection website had evidence of a follow-up collection featuring Metal Gear Solid 4, 2015’s The Phantom Pain, and 2010’s Peace Walker. However, the publisher never commented on the discovery publicly. It instead focused on both the first Master Collection volume and the upcoming Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater.
Since its release in 2008, Guns Of The Patriots has remained an outlier in the continued preservation of the Metal Gear Solid franchise. The original Metal Gear Solid was backward compatible with the PS2 and re-released digitally on the PlayStation Network across multiple Sony consoles and handhelds. It even received a controversial remake on the GameCube for those who missed it the first time around.
In 2011, Metal Gear Solid 2, 3, and Peace Walker received an HD upgrade for the first time on both PS3 and Xbox 360. The package also included the original MSX games Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Then last year, Konami brought most of these games to modern hardware once again, this time including PC.
Metal Gear Solid 4, however, the crucial final chapter in the series, has remained shackled to nearly 20-year-old hardware. Unless you were willing to stream the game through Sony’s short-lived PlayStation Now service a decade ago, players had to have a PlayStation 3 console and a copy of the game. Some of this was at the behest of series creator Hideo Kojima. Kojima repeatedly stated that he didn’t think the fourth game in the series could run on anything but a PS3. The lack of BluRay support on Xbox 360, as well as the absence of the PS3’s Cell processor, meant it could never be ported without retaining the graphical fidelity of the original release.
While this was widely debated among fans of the series for years, emulators prove that modern hardware has come far enough to run the game better than the PS3 ever could (as reported by Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry in 2022). While Kojima’s involvement in Metal Gear is sorely missed, Guns Of The Patriots finally getting a wide release is one of the few upsides of Konami’s takeover.
As someone who regrettably never owned a PlayStation 3, it remains the only game in the series that I’ve never played. The fact that the rest of the games in the series have surpassed it in sales suggests I’m not the only one.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots remains one of the biggest casualties of Sony abandoning backward compatibility halfway through the PS3’s life cycle. It is widely considered a satisfying conclusion to one of gaming’s most important series. But for those who missed it, there’s no legal means of playing it today. Konami has the opportunity to deliver this game to fans who missed it the first time around. Here’s to hoping that they do justice to this long-overdue release.
