Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

• 1. Introduction

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  Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is a 2010 stealth game from Kojima Productions, published by Konami, and it was made for one of the smallest screens of its day, the PlayStation Portable. IGN's Greg Miller scored it 9.5 out of 10 and said it "is probably the biggest game in the Metal Gear series, and it's only on Sony's smallest system". Hideo Kojima agreed with the scale of that claim, calling it the biggest game he had ever worked on.

  It is a Cold War story about mercenaries, a hidden army in Costa Rica, and a walking nuclear launch platform. How does a handheld hold an army to manage, a roster of colossal machines, and a conspiracy about atomic war? Why did a game that thrilled critics sell so unevenly across the world? And what could a machine built to guarantee nuclear retaliation possibly have to do with a dead soldier known as The Boss?

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• 2. Recruiting an Army

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  Far out in the Caribbean sits an abandoned research platform once run by OTEC, and in Peace Walker it becomes Mother Base, the headquarters of the mercenary unit Militaires Sans Frontières. The player does not simply fight from this place. The player runs it, assigning staff to combat, medical, intelligence and technology teams, and even to a mess hall crew that feeds the troops and keeps up morale.

  People arrive by force of arms. In the earlier handheld game, Portable Ops, a truck carried captured enemies home. Peace Walker replaces it with the Fulton Recovery System, which the player attaches to subdued soldiers and prisoners. Wi-Fi recruitment returns in altered form, and the player must now knock out soldiers with close quarters combat to accept them. The roster can reach 350 soldiers, and any extra staff caught in a mission must be discharged. Troublemakers go to the brig, and the wounded go to the sickbay.

  Equipment follows the same logic. Weapons and items are not picked up on site. MSF's research and development division builds them from blueprints gathered in missions, paid for with GMP, which stands for Gross Military Product and serves as the currency. Once a design is finished, the staff mass-produce it for the whole army.

  A mechanic called Outer Ops lets the player send soldiers and captured vehicles into certain battles against computer opponents. Each assault force is codenamed from Alpha to Hotel and has eight slots. Snake and the other unique characters stay home. The consequences linger, because a vehicle that is damaged in one mission stays damaged until it is pulled from the front for repairs.

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• 3. Machines With Minds

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  Four code names define the machines Snake hunts across Costa Rica: PUPA, CHRYSALIS, COCOON and, finally, the Peace Walker itself. They are advanced vehicles run by artificial intelligence, and beating them takes more than firepower. After the player damages one enough, an AI pod opens up, and the player must climb in and pull out the AI boards one by one to shut the thing down for good.

  How the fight goes decides what the player takes home. Depending on strategy, vehicle parts and AI boards can be harvested and used to build Metal Gear ZEKE. Dr. Emmerich designed this bipedal mech so that MSF could protect itself from foreign aggression. ZEKE can join Outer Ops missions as a support vehicle, and how far its development has come changes the difficulty of the final mission of the storyline.

  The game also steps outside its own war. A character named Trenya, borrowed from Capcom's Monster Hunter series, serves as Snake's transporter to a mythical island, where he can battle the Rathalos and Tigrex monsters from that series.

  That crossover had a long reach. The 2020 film Monster Hunter drew its story mainly from this event, with Milla Jovovich's Artemis and Tony Jaa's Hunter standing in for Big Boss and Trenya. Director Paul W. S. Anderson said, "I thought this was great imagery to juxtapose a man with a machine gun Snake against the creatures of Monster Hunter."

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• 4. Suits, Boxes and Partners

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  Before each mission, the player picks a character, and that choice shapes the weapons carried into the field. Snake is one option. So is any MSF soldier assigned to the combat unit, male or female, each with personal combat stats. Some main missions are open only to Snake, and certain extra ops are open only to ordinary soldiers.

  The wardrobe sets the loadout. The default Jungle Fatigues balance stealth, defense, weapons and inventory. The Naked outfit is a shirtless variant that moves faster but offers weaker defense and fewer items. The Sneaking Suit mutes foot noise and boosts camouflage, but limits the wearer to five items and six secondary weapons. The Battle Dress is heavy armor that lets the player carry a third primary weapon, at the price of speed and camouflage. The game adds t-shirts, swimsuits, a tuxedo, and outfits inspired by supporting characters.

  The cardboard box, a series trademark for hiding from guards, now comes in a two-man form called the Love Box. Controls can also be set to resemble Portable Ops, Guns of the Patriots, or Capcom's Monster Hunter series.

  The real draw of the design is company. Most missions can be played in a cooperative mode called Co-Ops. Two players can infiltrate together, and up to four can take on enemy vehicles and AI weapons. In the "snake formation", one player leads and the other synchronizes, so both can fire on the move. Partners can hold closing doors, share items, act as a spotter when vision is blocked, and perform CPR on a fallen comrade.

  Versus Ops moves the action to special versions of certain maps. Matches host up to six players in deathmatches, team deathmatches, base capture and quetzal capture. Only items and weapons unlocked in the single-player campaign can be used, and life and psyche points are not regained.

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• 5. Deterrence by Machine

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  The story begins on the 4th of November 1974, with Big Boss running a mercenary unit in Colombia, ten years after the death of The Boss during Operation Snake Eater. A paramilitary group called the Peace Sentinels has appeared in Costa Rica with the firepower of a land army. The country's constitution forbids an official military, so its government cannot respond.

  A professor named Ramon Galvez Mena and his student Paz Ortega Andrade ask MSF for help. Snake refuses, because he identifies Galvez as a KGB agent. Paz changes his mind by playing a recording of The Boss. In Costa Rica, Snake traces a shipment to a mountain research facility. There he watches the CIA station chief, Hot Coldman, announce plans to fire a live nuclear weapon as part of Project Peace Walker, a fail-deadly nuclear tank.

  The idea behind it is chilling. Coldman believes nuclear deterrence is a flawed theory, because it relies on humans who may be unwilling to destroy their own race. An impartial AI would guarantee retaliation. The AI's control systems come from Dr. Strangelove, who modeled them on The Boss' personality and demands to know whether The Boss truly defected to the Soviet Union.

  Snake chases the walker across the Nicaraguan border to an American airbase on the shores of Lake Cocibolca. Soviet soldiers led by Galvez, whose real name is Vladimir Zadornov, storm the facility to hijack the machine. MSF and the Sandinistas arrive in time for Snake to destroy it. Coldman, dying, then triggers the data uplink and convinces NORAD that a Soviet strike is coming. The Boss' personality takes control of the damaged AI and drowns the machine in the lake.

  A betrayal follows. Paz, acting for Major Zero, who now calls himself Cipher, seizes Metal Gear ZEKE and demands that Snake surrender MSF. Snake cripples the mech, and Paz is thrown into the ocean. Snake accepts the title of Big Boss and declares his soldiers to be living in "Outer Heaven".

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• 6. Sound and Purpose

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  Peace Walker began as an idea during the making of Portable Ops. Kojima planned to leave the project to other Kojima Productions members, but he became director, even as he worked on Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. His aim was a clearer message for a young audience. The team matched the size of the Guns of the Patriots crew. During planning, the game carried the name Metal Gear Solid 5: Peace Walker.

  The PSP was chosen because some content, such as the cooperative multiplayer, only worked there. Kojima intended co-op to make players help each other and grow a sense of friendship. Customization and levelling up were added to increase replay value. The theme, in a word, is "Peace", with antiwar and antinuclear ideas now focused on relations between countries. The tale also shows how Snake's experiences lead him to take the title of Big Boss, drawing him closer to the antagonist of the first Metal Gear game. Because of its target audience, it became the first main Metal Gear game with a "Teen" rating from the ESRB since Portable Ops Plus.

  The music tells the story in its own way. The original soundtrack came out on the 14th of April 2010, composed mainly by Kazuma Jinnouchi and Nobuko Toda, with Akihiro Honda writing the orchestral theme. The English theme song, "Heavens Divide", was sung by the Australian singer and actress Donna Burke. The Japanese one, "Koi no Yokushiryoku (Love Deterrence)", was sung by Nana Mizuki, who also voices Paz in Japanese.

  The credits carry a faithful cover of the Carpenters' 1973 performance of "Sing", sung by Cindy Asada. Inside the story it is a taped recording, and the Boss AI sings it. The game also used the Vocaloid software, which later powered fan-made voices for ZEKE.

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• 7. Cans, Contests and Collectors

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  On the 27th of March 2010, the Japanese beverage firm Suntory released eight special cans featuring Peace Walker characters for its Mountain Dew and Pepsi Nex lines. Inside the game these drinks serve as health items, and a code printed on real cans could earn Snake a Mountain Dew shirt. The apparel brand Uniqlo ran a similar promotion. Outside Japan, the labels were swapped for generic names and the MSF logo. Sony also released a limited camouflage Walkman, the NWZ-W252CAMO, with game codes and six exclusive tracks.

  On the 1st of April 2010, Konami posted an April Fool's video with Patrice Desilets, creative director of Assassin's Creed II. In it Snake does Altair's "leap of faith" into a pile of hay. The gag became a special Love Box in the game. Two years earlier, Konami and Ubisoft had produced an Altair costume joke for Metal Gear Solid 4.

  Collectors had plenty to chase. Square Enix's Play Arts Kai line of figures arrived on the 7th of April 2010, and a Snake figure from Kaiyodo's Revoltech line followed in 2012. A Japanese bundle of 1,974 copies sold for 36,980 yen and included a camouflaged PSP-3000, dog tags and numbered stands. In the Americas, a GameStop exclusive Big Boss Pack arrived on the 8th of June 2010 for 199 US dollars.

  American fans got a scavenger hunt on PlayStation Home. The "Code Hunt" began on the 5th of May 2010 and put teams of five on the trail of codes, with 10,000 dollars in cash as part of the prize. Meanwhile Konami toured the game through Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, New York, Paris and London.

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• 8. Scores, Sales and Afterlife

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  The Japanese magazine Weekly Famitsu gave Peace Walker a perfect 40 out of 40 in its issue of the 5th of May 2010. It was the fourteenth game to earn that mark and the first on the PSP. Metacritic lists a score of 89. The magazine PSM3 gave it 91 percent. At the 2009 Tokyo Game Show it won Best of Show and Best PSP Game, and IGN later named it PSP Game of the Year, along with prizes for Best Story and Best Co-Op.

  The sales story is different. In Japan the game sold 574,957 copies in two weeks. Abroad, it did poorly. In the UK it placed 13th in its first week and dropped out of the top 40 by its third. In the United States it sold only 52,000 physical copies in its first month. Analyst Mike Hickey blamed the weak PSP market, and Kojima later cited the low overseas sales as the reason Kazuhira Miller was left off the international box art of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. By 2014 the PSP version had sold 1.99 million copies.

  The game kept growing after launch. Downloadable content added uniforms, music, and new AI boss voices. The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011 briefly pulled the servers offline to save power. The NetVocaloid services closed on the 28th of February 2012, and the rest of the content ended on the 30th of September 2013, though third-party sites have preserved it.

  An HD Edition for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 lifted the resolution from 272p to 720p and ran at 60 frames per second. A feature called Transfarring let players move saves between versions. The story also spread to an audio drama album, Blues of Peace and Kazuhira, with a Kojima story about how Big Boss first met Kazuhira Miller, and a novelization by Kenji Yano published in March 2014.

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