Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes

• 1. Introduction

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  Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes came together because of a chance meeting in a Nintendo cafeteria in Japan. Denis Dyack, CEO of Silicon Knights, had just finished Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem in 2002. He was sitting in that cafeteria when Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata approached him. They asked whether Silicon Knights would rebuild the 1998 PlayStation landmark Metal Gear Solid for the GameCube. Dyack said yes. The project that followed raised several questions. How far could a film director push the game's cinematics before the series creator asked for changes? What technical problem forced the entire voice cast to record their lines again? And would mechanics borrowed from a sequel improve the original, or unbalance it? Nintendo of America confirmed the project publicly in 2003, naming Silicon Knights as the studio that would take it on.

• 2. Kojima Steps Back

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  Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear's creator, had already committed to Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, due in 2004. He could not take on The Twin Snakes directly. Unable to lead the project himself, he told Miyamoto and Iwata to put Silicon Knights in charge, recommending them because he admired their work. Although Silicon Knights handled most of the development, Kojima kept an oversight role at a distance. His most direct intervention came when he reviewed the game's early cinematics and told the director to redo them in a completely different style.

• 3. Kitamura's Reinvention

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  Ryuhei Kitamura was brought in to direct the cinematics. His first pass aimed to make them look identical to the original Metal Gear Solid. Hideo Kojima looked at those early cuts and asked Kitamura to redo them in his own well-known action style. The reworked sequences bear Kitamura's signature clearly. Slow-motion bullet time effects appear throughout. Kitamura drew the technique directly from The Matrix, then a widely popular film. Critics later pointed to the excessive use of bullet time as a weakness.

  Steve Henifin and Silicon Knights' staff handled some of the in-game music. Konami's team covered the menus, cutscenes, and remaining in-game tracks. That Konami contingent included Norihiko Hibino, who had co-composed the score for Metal Gear Solid 2. The audio ambitions of The Twin Snakes extended beyond the soundtrack. The voice cast would need to re-record their lines, and the reason lay in the GameCube hardware itself.

• 4. Hayter's Campaign

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  David Hayter, the English voice of Solid Snake, persuaded Konami to bring back almost the entire original cast. His argument was not simply about continuity. According to Hayter, the GameCube's superior audio quality had exposed a technical problem with the original recordings. Those recordings had been made without a sound-proof studio. The PlayStation's lower fidelity had kept the ambient noise inaudible. On the GameCube, it became a problem.

  Greg Eagles was the only cast member whose role changed significantly. In the original game, he had voiced both Gray Fox and Donald Anderson. In The Twin Snakes, Eagles returned only as Anderson. Rob Paulsen stepped in as the Cyborg Ninja.

  Mei Ling, Nastasha Romanenko, and Naomi Hunter had spoken with Chinese, Russian, and English accents in the original. In The Twin Snakes, all three speak with North American accents. The Japanese release did not include a separate Japanese dub. The Japanese version used the English voice track with subtitles. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, released in 2008, drew on the Twin Snakes recordings during Snake's reminiscence sequences.

• 5. Borrowed Mechanics

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  Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, released in 2001, served as the template for The Twin Snakes's redesigned gameplay. Every map and enemy encounter from the 1998 original was preserved. Players gained the ability to aim and fire from a first-person view. Enemy soldiers received improved artificial intelligence, letting them communicate with each other and detect the player through sight and sound more precisely. The gap between those new capabilities and the original game's level design would prove contentious. Critics would single out a specific boss fight as the clearest test case.

• 6. The Premium Package

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  The Twin Snakes was originally scheduled for November 2003, but that date slipped for all regional launches. North America received the game on the 9th of March, 2004. Japan's release followed two days later, on the 11th of March, alongside an exclusive set unavailable anywhere else. The Premium Package included the game, a platinum-colored GameCube console decorated with the FOXHOUND logo, and a 44-page book called Memorandum. That book contained production notes, sketches, and photographs from the development of The Twin Snakes. A separate disc, the Special Disc, contained an emulated version of the Family Computer edition of the original Metal Gear. European copies arrived several weeks after the North American launch. Critics in all markets had their say shortly after.

• 7. Critical Reception

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  Game Informer scored The Twin Snakes at 9.25 out of 10, praising its improved gameplay and graphics and calling the story's retelling faithful. IGN gave the game 8.5 out of 10, comparing its presentation to epic films. GameSpot rated it 8.2 out of 10, using the label "Great." Eurogamer gave it 8 out of 10, and Gaming Age awarded an "A-". Across review aggregators, GameRankings arrived at 85.58% and Metacritic at 85 out of 100.

  GamePro described the frame rate as flagging, with bouts of slowdown appearing when too much activity crowded the screen. The publication argued that the Sons of Liberty mechanics had been layered onto a level design never updated to accommodate them. According to GamePro, that design gap broke the challenge. The fight against Revolver Ocelot suffered most acutely.