This Week In Retro: Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (Patreon)

March 9, 2004: I'm seeing double! Four Snakes!

by Diamond Feit

Given the increasingly stagnant state of mainstream pop culture, we should have seen the current regurgitative climate of big-budget video games coming. Every year as development costs rise, executives seek to attract the maximum number of consumers to their wares in the name of profit. Spending millions—perhaps billions—to create and market a brand-new product makes less sense than banking on an already-familiar name to draw a crowd. Hollywood figured this out years ago, but now software publishers across the globe mine their back catalogs for titles they can remaster or remake for the masses.

Of course, video games and movies differ in many ways, but the lack of standardized, long-lasting platforms makes it more difficult for people to enjoy games from the past. Some consoles offer backwards compatibility but that only applies to a small fraction of gaming history; my PlayStation 5 will not recognize any of my PlayStation 3 purchases, let alone the vintage PS1 or PS2 discs sitting on my shelf. Meanwhile, that same stubborn console will play cinematic DVDs that I bought more than 25 years ago.

Given these restrictions, the practice of remaking hit video games for new machines goes back decades. Nintendo reworked all four 8-bit Super Mario games as Super Mario All-Stars for the SNES. Konami revisited the original Castlevania many times over, eventually remaking a remake as Castlevania Chronicles for the original PlayStation. Capcom's found huge success in recent years with reimagined versions of classic Resident Evil games, but that came about long after the company famously recreated the very first game in the series for the GameCube in 2002.

Speaking of Nintendo's underappreciated lunchbox, in 2004 the company lured another famous third-party into their walled garden. When Konami released Metal Gear Solid in 1998, it represented a new high point for the medium with its immersive gameplay and melodramatic characters. Nintendo wanted that Solid Snake bump for their own hardware and reached out to Konami to make a deal. A few meetings and several years later, GameCube owners got a tactical espionage action blockbuster to call their own in Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.

Porting video games from one platform to another remains a common practice to this day, but that's not what Nintendo or Konami wanted for The Twin Snakes. By the time the two companies began negotiating, Metal Gear Solid 2 had already hit the PlayStation 2 and Hideo Kojima's team was well into development of a third game. A straightforward recreation of the first game in the series wouldn't have much impact, not when the GameCube already had plenty of newer, more polished 3D action games. Hence the decision to remake the game from the ground up, taking advantage of newer graphics capabilities to make a version of Metal Gear Solid that bears a closer resemblance to its sequels.

The catch, as noted above, was that the original brainchild behind the Metal Gear franchise had far too much on his plate to turn his undivided attention towards an unfamiliar console. With Kojima and his collaborators hard at work on Metal Gear Solid 3, Nintendo recommended second-party studio Silicon Knights, the Canadian developers behind Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. According to Twin Snakes producer Denis Dyack, Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto casually asked him about his interest in such a project in the Kyoto company's cafeteria. Dyack immediately agreed.

As if a video game supervised by Shigeru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima didn't have enough talent behind it, up-and-coming filmmaker Ryuhei Kitamura also signed up to direct The Twin Snakes' cinematic cutscenes. Kojima expressed his admiration for Kitamura to GameSpot in 2004, saying "I think there's no one better than Mr. Kitamura in the Japanese film industry right now. And the thing is, a Metal Gear game has to be directed by me, but if it wasn't me, if it's Ryuhei Kitamura, then fine, please, do as you wish, I can say that."

With a new studio coding the software behind it all and a hip director rearranging the dramatic action, the question of who would voice the game's many characters remained. The Twin Snakes couldn't simply reuse the tracks from 1998, as background noise from the original voice-over sessions would now taint the dialogue due to GameCube's improved audio capabilities. Since this meant re-recording the full script, Konami originally planned to bring in new actors to perform the supporting roles, only asking lead David Hayter to return as Solid Snake. Thankfully, Hayter argued that the original Metal Gear Solid cast deserved to come back given their part in making the first game a success, so he negotiated for their return by offering to reduce his own compensation.

Even though The Twin Snakes faithfully transposes the entire island of Shadow Moses and all its inhabitants to new hardware, the 2004 version differs from the 1998 version in a number of ways. Silicon Knights upgraded Solid Snake's moveset to align with Metal Gear Solid 2, including his ability to aim and shoot in first-person mode. This adds a precision element to combat in The Twin Snakes that did not exist in the original game, albeit a completely optional one.

Other bonuses include additional difficulty tweaks which make the game easier for newcomers and harder for those already well-versed with the PlayStation version. The now-famous Metal Gear Solid radar system originally went blank whenever Snake crawled into tight spaces, but Twin Snakes allows players to keep the radar on in those circumstances. They can also disable the radar altogether, forcing them to rely solely on Snake's field of view to spot enemy troops. Furthermore, The Twin Snakes adds an extra-hard mode that instantly triggers a Game Over the moment Snake is detected, making the entire mission a mandatory stealth sequence.

One unshakable change comes with the Nintendo GameCube's distinct input device. The original Metal Gear Solid made specific use of every single button on the PlayStation DualShock, necessitating compromises to map those actions to the GameCube controller which features a different layout and fewer buttons overall. The Twin Snakes combines inventory sorting and equipping items to the Left and Right shoulder buttons which makes sense, allowing players easy access to Snake's deep pockets. However, with no Select button to work with, The Twin Snakes doubles up on using the Start button. This means simple tasks like answering the Codec and pausing the game require pressing two buttons at once, a rather inelegant solution.

The aforementioned rerecording issues also impact The Twin Snakes; even if the script hasn't changed, the performances have. David Hayter's Solid Snake remains as gruff as ever, but a number of Snake's pals such as Mei Ling, Dr. Naomi Hunter, and Nastasha Romanenko drop their pronounced accents from the first game. These characters' new vocal stylings would become the standard for their future appearances, with the side effect that their more natural portrayals make Hayter's gravely Snake-voice sound out of place here. I don't fault Hayter for sticking to his guns, but his heightened tough-guy feels like he should be chatting with likewise exaggerated archetypes.

It is impossible to evaluate The Twin Snakes without constantly comparing it to its 1998 progenitor, an unenviable position for any piece of media, but especially one that must compete with a titan of Metal Gear Solid's caliber. Silicon Knights attempts to lavishly recreate a beloved video game by playing all the same beats with new instruments. Their devotion to the original work necessarily highlights every change made to the source material; since so much of The Twin Snakes tries to replicate a then-six-year-old PlayStation game, it accentuates each alteration regardless of size.

The first thing most players will notice is undoubtedly the fancy new graphics afforded to The Twin Snakes by Nintendo's hardware. In interviews with Denis Dyack timed to promote the game's release, he hypes improvements to the frame rate, the number of polygons on screen, and throws in technical jargon like "bump-mapping" and "shine-mapping." These augments concerning the game's visual fidelity cannot be denied, but I would argue they do little to enhance the experience.

Giving every character a face capable of animation instead of a single texture is certainly a welcome change, yet in practice this doesn't actually make the characters more emotive or empathetic. If anything, a static visage benefits the always-stoic Solid Snake, a man who seeks to maintain his composure in the face of overwhelming odds. On occasion, the high-resolution 3D models even detract from the events on screen. Little things like Snake's bandana or Anderson's tie now have weight and collision, causing them to flop around during conversations in a distracting manner.

A great example of Metal Gear Solid making the best of the PlayStation's limitations lies in the game's Briefing scene, where the Colonel and Dr. Hunter give Snake a rundown of the entire situation on Shadow Moses. While fully voice-acted, the Briefing uses largely static drawings of Snake, adding occasional animated flourishes like moving silhouettes. Important information appears overlaid atop the characters, as if they and the players are both viewing the same urgent Powerpoint presentation.

The Twin Snakes turns the Briefing into just another cutscene, replacing the illustrations and data screens with the three characters hanging around an office. Instead of a fixed viewpoint on Solid Snake, the protagonist, all three people pace about and gesture at one another. It retains the same fundamental material but presents it in a far less interesting manner, diluting what was once a riveting introduction to our hero and the scenario at hand.

Metal Gear Solid never embraced subtlety as a virtue, not with its long speeches about nuclear proliferation and villains named Revolver Ocelot. However, under the direction of Ryuhei Kitamura, The Twin Snakes' cinematics amplify everything beyond what I'd call "over the top." Solid Snake now backflips and somersaults away from threats, adding a flourish to every scripted evasion. Ocelot always twirled his revolver while threatening his prey, but now he practically juggles his sidearm by flipping it into the air.

Things really escalate once the Ninja appears. Instead of just slicing explosive wires and fleeing the scene after making his debut, he chops through solid pillars and engages Snake with a flurry of punches and kicks. When Snake catches up to him for their first actual fight, Snake fires off a round that the camera tracks in slow-motion as the ninja slices it in half with his sword. If this sounds awesome, it is, but it also heightens an already outrageous conflict to a degree that borders on absurd.

Lest we forget, the original Metal Gear Solid launched mere months before The Matrix arrived in movie theaters and codified how action films would look for years to come. Ryuhei Kitamura clearly took inspiration from the Wachowski's sci-fi classic in developing his style as a director; you can see super-cool dudes wearing trenchcoats doing martial arts and shooting guns in many early Kitamura films, from his debut feature Versus to the blockbuster Godzilla Final Wars. By injecting Matrix-style wire-fu and bullets that ripple through the air into The Twin Snakes, Kitamura creates a version of Metal Gear Solid that looks distinct from Kojima's initial vision, but it also feels dated today in ways that other GameCube games do not.

I'm certain that in 2004, a significant number of video game fans would have wanted to play Metal Gear Solid on their GameCube, either because they missed it the first time around or because they already enjoyed it and wished to see a prettier version. To that end, The Twin Snakes more than meets its goals, taking Kojima's foundational creation and transfarring it to a more advanced platform.

Two decades later, The Twin Snakes strikes me as a curious experiment, a product overseen by three different companies plus one film director that comes across less muddled than you might expect given its pedigree. Aside from fulfilling a pursuit's desire to play absolutely every Solid Snake game ever made, I can't imagine seeking this version out today, not when the PlayStation original holds such cultural cache. Few of the "improvements" add real value to the experience, giving the entire package a vague sense of irrelevance.

That said, The Twin Snakes would have made a welcome addition to Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Volume 1, but I'd wager Konami wanted to offer the same package across all platforms and Nintendo didn't want to see their software running on anyone else's hardware. I understand their dilemma, but given Nintendo's reluctance to rerelease GameCube games in any official capacity, it feels like a missed opportunity to get one more title out there in the wild. If only we could send an intrusion expert to get the lowdown on why Nintendo keeps the company's games locked up tight. I bet Solid Snake would procure all the answers we need in exchange for nothing more than a pack of smokes.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.