Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

• 1. Introduction

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  Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty reached North American shelves on the 13th of November 2001. Hyper Magazine had already named it the most anticipated game for the PlayStation 2 that year. Its creator, Hideo Kojima, had spent four years directing, producing, designing, and writing every element himself. He had also built, in those same four years, one of the most elaborate marketing deceptions in gaming history.

  Every promotional trailer had shown Solid Snake, the series' established protagonist, in battles that the finished game assigned to a completely different character. That character's name was Raiden. The gaming public had never heard of him.

  The protagonist twist was only the surface of a deeper ambition. Sons of Liberty carried a story about governments, militaries, and the player operating as puppets inside a total system of information control. Its central conspiracy wrapped around an artificial intelligence, a shadow organization called the Patriots, and a plan to engineer human belief at the scale of a society.

  By 2016, critics were comparing the game's specific ideas to post-truth politics and the engineered reality of social media news feeds. The game's design document had mapped out those ideas before production had fully begun.

• 2. The Protagonist Gamble

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  Feedback from debuggers and testers of the original Metal Gear Solid was direct: players were tired of "only playing rugged old-looking guys in these games." Hideo Kojima's answer was Raiden: young, inexperienced, and designed to function as a blank slate for any player.

  There was also a craft reason for the change. After three mainline Metal Gear titles, inserting basic weapon and mission tutorials into Solid Snake's dialogue had become implausible. A veteran soldier of his standing did not need to be told how to handle a firearm. A young rookie gave the script a natural reason for those explanations.

  Keeping Raiden's existence hidden required a sustained campaign of misdirection. Pre-release trailers showed Solid Snake fighting a Harrier jet on the George Washington Bridge and confronting a new Cyborg Ninja inside a tanker. Both scenes, in the published game, happen to Raiden.

  On the day of the North American launch, Konami held a reveal event at Zepp Tokyo to introduce Raiden to Japanese audiences. Japan received the game two weeks later, on November 29. By then, European gaming magazines had already documented the game's major story developments in the weeks since the North American release.

  The Japanese packaging reflected that context: Raiden stands prominently beside Solid Snake on the Japanese cover, while American and European editions showed Snake alone. The Japanese version also included two extra modes unlocked after completing the game. Boss Survival replays all boss encounters as either Snake or Raiden; Casting Theater lets players swap character models within cutscenes.

• 3. Stealth Reimagined

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  Guards in Sons of Liberty can be distracted by a piece of thrown fruit or blinded briefly by steam from nearby pipes. Players can walk at a reduced pace to cross noisy flooring without making a sound. They can also hang from walkways to pass beneath a guard's line of sight.

  The enemy AI was redesigned to answer those new tools. Guards work in squads, flank a player once spotted, and radio for strike teams arriving with body armor and riot shields. Even after the player reaches a hiding spot, a sweep team moves in to check the area. The game's collective AI, where guards communicate and coordinate in real time, was considered among the best in the industry for years after release.

  The expanded cover system lets Solid Snake or Raiden duck behind walls or objects, pop out to fire, and retreat. Enemies use the same logic: they hide, throw grenades blindly from cover, and call for backup before re-engaging. A laser sight mechanic assists with manual aiming throughout.

  One of the game's quieter achievements: the entire game, including every boss encounter, can be completed without causing a single deliberate death. Tranquilizer guns, stun grenades, and melee takedowns make a non-lethal run possible from start to finish.

  The expanded edition, Substance, added 350 VR missions set in computer-constructed environments. A further 150 Alternative missions were set in areas taken directly from the main game.

• 4. A Signal in the Noise

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  Matthew Weise of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology drew on Sons of Liberty for his paper How Videogames Express Ideas. He described it as "perhaps the most vivid example of a game that uses tension between different levels of player agency to fuel a multi-faceted ideological argument." Weise pointed specifically to Solidus Snake's assertion that the United States operates as a "totalitarian regime of thought control."

  The game's narrative ranges across meme theory, social engineering, artificial intelligence, information control, fifth-generation warfare, existentialism, and censorship. Gamasutra compared its philosophical dimensions to the work of Thomas Hobbes, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Tanner Higgin examined Sons of Liberty in the book Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games. He described its narrative as a critique of "the very networks of biopolitical and informational control that comprise the postmodern military."

  By 2011, Dugan Patrick of Gamasutra noted that the game had predicted elements of Facebook, particularly how the platform allows users to "intentionally censor their own experience within the self-curated walls of Facebook." In 2016, Alex Wiltshire of Glixel called Sons of Liberty "strangely prescient of not only its own time but also today," drawing connections to post-truth politics and the curated Facebook News Feed.

  In March 2018, GamesRadar drew direct comparisons to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and to investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. The same year, Adrian Mróz published an academic paper applying the game's concept of "Selection for Societal Sanity" to a philosophical framework drawn from Bernard Stiegler's writing on post-truth and information filtration in modern society.

  Steven Poole wrote in Edge in 2012 that the game's story remained "in a different league from the vast majority of videogame yarns." He asked whether Sons of Liberty represented "the pinnacle of a now-vanished era, the age of the experimental mainstream."

• 5. Building the Game

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  Hideo Kojima's original plot for Sons of Liberty involved nuclear weapons inspections in Iraq and Iran. Solid Snake would race against a time limit to stop a Metal Gear located on an aircraft carrier. He would also confront Liquid Snake and his group. About six months into the project, the political situation in the Middle East made that storyline untenable. The tanker chapter in the released game preserves a trace of that earlier concept.

  The script also drew from Paul Auster's novel City of Glass. Raiden's original support team included Colonel Daniel Quinn and a woman named Maxine "Max" Work, who saved game data and quoted Shakespeare. A third planned character, William "Doc" Wilson, was designed as the creator of the game's central AI. All three were named after figures in Auster's novel and were intended to be revealed as artificial intelligences. None survived to the final release; their roles passed to the Colonel Campbell simulation, Rose, and Emma Emmerich. One name from City of Glass did persist in the finished game: Peter Stillman.

  A villain named Chinaman, originally designed for the game, was cut before completion. His abilities were incorporated into the character Vamp, including the capacity to walk on water and walls. Chinaman's movements had been modeled after Jet Li, and a dragon tattoo on his body was planned to animate when he entered water.

  The September 11 attacks prompted significant late revisions to the game's New York City finale. A sequence in which Arsenal Gear displaces the Statue of Liberty was removed. A post-credits news broadcast showing the Statue at its new resting place on Ellis Island was also cut. A scene of Solidus Snake shredding the New York Stock Exchange flag with his sword was removed. American flags planned for every flagpole in the New York sections were taken out of the title.

  One final late change affected Raiden's name. The Japanese katakana spelling was changed to kanji, rendering it as 雷電, because the phonetic katakana form resembled the name "Bin Laden" in Japanese.

  Konami published Kojima's original design document in 2002. An English translation followed in 2006.

• 6. Composing the Score

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  Hideo Kojima's first choice as composer was Hans Zimmer, but Zimmer's fee was too high. Kojima and sound director Kazuki Muraoka watched The Replacement Killers together, and from that viewing Kojima settled on Harry Gregson-Williams, another composer from Zimmer's studio. A mix CD of 18 tracks drawn from Gregson-Williams' existing work was sent to his office. Some of the tracks were unreleased recordings; others were contributions to films that had gone undocumented. Flattered by the depth of the research, Gregson-Williams joined the project.

  No shared language connected the Japanese development team to Gregson-Williams, and the cutscenes were still unfinished when composition began. Short phrases or descriptions of the intended action were sent to the composer in place of footage. The resulting themes then shaped how the action sequences were assembled. Gregson-Williams also re-orchestrated the original Metal Gear Solid Main Theme for the game's opening title sequence.

  Norihiko Hibino, who had previously worked on Metal Gear: Ghost Babel for Konami, handled the in-game music and the majority of the cutscene score. He also re-orchestrated Gregson-Williams' Main Theme remix for use across several of those sequences.

  The overall score incorporates more electronic elements than the original Metal Gear Solid, particularly breakbeat, reflecting the story's preoccupation with a machine-driven society. Rika Muranaka returned to provide the vocal ending theme: a jazz piece called "Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday," performed by Carla White.

  Gregson-Williams' main theme was later selected by the London Philharmonic Orchestra for their Greatest Video Game Music compilation.

• 7. Unprecedented Demand

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  In Japan, Sons of Liberty sold 400,000 units on its first day of release, against a backdrop of 600,000 pre-orders in the country. It ended 2001 as the tenth-best-selling game in Japan and the best-selling Konami title in that market for the year. In the United States, the game sold 500,000 units within two days of its release and reached 680,000 copies by the fifth day. Sons of Liberty topped the video game rental chart in November 2001 and finished among the four best-selling games in the country that year.

  Europe generated 1.57 million pre-orders, exceeding Konami's own projection of 1 million. The European release, originally scheduled for the 22nd of February 2002, was pushed to March 8. Konami included a video DVD titled The Making of Metal Gear Solid 2 with each European copy as an apology for the delay. The DVD featured a documentary produced by French television production company FunTV, filmed at Konami's Japanese studio.

  In the United Kingdom, Sons of Liberty sold 200,000 copies within three days. The PlayStation 2 version earned a Platinum award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association, which requires at least 300,000 units sold in the UK. A Platinum Award from Germany recognized sales above 200,000 units there.

  The expanded edition, Substance, was released on Xbox and Windows in addition to PlayStation 2. Combined worldwide sales of Sons of Liberty and Substance totaled 7.03 million units, making it the highest-selling title in the Metal Gear series at the time.

  On release, Famitsu magazine scored the PlayStation 2 version a 35 out of 40.

• 8. What Outlasted the Hype

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  Neil Druckmann, director of The Last of Us Part II, cited the Raiden revelation in Sons of Liberty as a direct inspiration. The protagonist shift in his 2020 game was shaped, in part, by what Kojima had done in 2001. Ubisoft developed Splinter Cell partly in response to the same game, describing the project internally as a Metal Gear Solid 2 killer. The E3 2000 reveal of Sons of Liberty has been credited with accelerating PlayStation 2 adoption during the sixth console generation. Commentators have also cited it as a factor in the commercial collapse of Sega's Dreamcast.

  Several mechanics developed in Sons of Liberty spread through the stealth and action genres. The cover system spread to Kill Switch in 2003, Resident Evil 4 in 2005, and Gears of War in 2006. The laser sight mechanic followed a similar path through subsequent titles.

  Goichi Suda's Killer7 has been cited as carrying the game's postmodern influence. BioShock, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and Portal have also been identified as bearing similar metanarrative debts. Gameranx described the first half of Captain America: The Winter Soldier as "probably the closest movie adaptation we've gotten to Metal Gear Solid 2," noting shared elements of stealth, secret organizations, and the tension between personal liberty and security.

  John Linneman of Digital Foundry described Sons of Liberty as having set a new standard in cinematic presentation for its time. Large numbers of enemies persisted on screen after encounters, real-time light and shadow interacted with the environment, and multi-tiered levels were built as miniature sandboxes.

  Sons of Liberty and its predecessor appeared together at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibition The Art of Video Games in 2012. Wired placed Sons of Liberty at number 13 in its 2009 list of fifteen most influential games of the decade. The magazine concluded that every "videogame story that subverts a player's expectations owes a debt to the ground broken by Metal Gear Solid 2."

  Filmmaker Jordan Peele has described playing Sons of Liberty as a turning point in his understanding of the medium. "From the first moment I played Metal Gear Solid 2, I knew I was experiencing the work of an artist whose craft just hits different," he said.

  On the 24th of October 2023, Sons of Liberty reached PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Steam. The release came as part of Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 1. Kojima's 2001 argument about controlled information was now playable on platforms whose audiences had grown up inside the systems the game had predicted.