That is the man whose story I tell.
His code name was Solid Snake, but as well known as the moniker is now, it’s hardly a code. Say the name Snake to anyone, and they’ll say something like, “Oh, the legend.” The hero of Shadow Moses. The mighty champion who crushed Outer Heaven and brought down Zanzibar Land. The man who made the impossible possible, the man who destroyed the devil’s weapon, Metal Gear, again and again.
The legend.
Snake grew tired of being called that.
Truth be told, back when I first met him, I hadn’t heard anything about him yet. I was just a science geek, and all I cared about was using the funds of a gigantic military corporation to build a robot like the ones I’d seen in Japanese anime.
Anime and technology—that was all that defined me. I devoted myself to my work, giving birth to a two-legged walking robot weapon, clueless in my childish naiveté to its actual purpose.
Yes, I created Metal Gear REX.
The American government requested—or should I say, ordered—Snake to a remote island off the coast of Alaska to destroy REX. The Next-Generation Special Forces unit FOXHOUND rebelled against the United States and took control of the Metal Gear, and with it, they could launch a nuclear strike anywhere in the world.
Shadow Moses Island was located in the Fox Archipelago, and there, in the deadly cold winds of the Bering Strait, training exercises with the Metal Gear were under way. FOXHOUND, which had been ordered on protective duty during the training exercises, seized the island and its stockpile of nuclear warheads. Using threat of nuclear attack, they made their demands of Washington. After the end of the Cold War, the island became home to an enormous stockpile of nuclear warheads no longer needed elsewhere.
The trouble with nuclear warheads, ICBMs and the like, is the expansive amount of money required to deploy them. And without a Cold War, there wasn’t a need for that expense. Both Russia, whose government collapsed due to her failed economy, and her counterpart America were eager to restrain their spiraling military expenditures.
But not everyone saw it that way.
Some bureaucrats thought that order had been kept in the world because of the nuclear threat that could wipe out hundreds of thousands in an instant. Others saw the profitable industry fueled by the ceaseless development of new tanks and weaponry by the Soviets and the Americans as each stared down the threat of total annihilation.
Among the latter group were DARPA chief Donald Anderson and ArmsTech president Kenneth Baker. In hopes of restoring the prosperity each had found during the Cold War, they utilized black project funds secret from public accountability to start up development of a new Metal Gear.
The Metal Gear that FOXHOUND stole on Shadow Moses.
But no matter how many nuclear warheads the terrorist group got their hands on, the weapons wouldn’t mean anything unless they could deliver the payloads across the sea and onto American soil. Why else had both sides of the Cold War pushed so hard to develop space rockets? But Metal Gear REX didn’t need to rely on rockets to make its deadly delivery to any point on the globe.
A railgun was mounted on REX’s right shoulder. Nuclear warheads placed on the rail could be shot at tremendous speed by a magnetic force created by an immense influx of electricity. Effectively, REX was a cannon with no need for gunpowder. The basic mechanics were identical—only this cannon could fire projectiles into space.
And its ordnance was quite different from missiles or rockets, which relied on burning fuel for propulsion. A warhead fired by REX would have too high a velocity to be shot down and, with no smoke trail or heat signature, would be undetectable by satellite or radar.
The devil’s weapon, Metal Gear REX, would usher in the twenty-first century.
FOXHOUND was led by one of the Snakes who changed the world. He was Solid Snake’s clone brother and, in a sense, was Solid Snake himself. He tried to surpass Big Boss, and he failed. This was Liquid Snake.
Solid Snake had infiltrated Shadow Moses Island on orders to determine the extent of the threat posed by FOXHOUND and, once confirmed, put a stop to it. Solid Snake had once been a member of the next-generation US Army unit established by Big Boss on behalf of the Department of Defense to handle combat situations too politically sensitive to intervene in through public means. During this time, Big Boss also secretly founded the mercenary company Outer Heaven in South Africa, where he developed the first Metal Gear with the intent of global destruction.
The mission thrust upon the rookie soldier: You are to infiltrate the enemy fortress “Outer Heaven” and destroy their final weapon Metal Gear.
Big Boss chose the young and inexperienced Solid Snake for the role because he’d hoped the mission would fail. Publicly, Big Boss was the commander of FOXHOUND, but his second identity—the one that held his true allegiance—was as the commander of Outer Heaven.
Much to Big Boss’s surprise, Snake proved himself a capable warrior. At the time, Snake didn’t know he had inherited his innate prowess from Big Boss. But in the end, the young clone destroyed Metal Gear and bested his original in combat. In effect, Big Boss was defeated by his own shadow.
Ironically, due to these events, FOXHOUND became known to the world, and the existence of Big Boss was covered up. Afterward, Big Boss fled to Zanzibar Land, a remote former Soviet satellite in the Middle East, where he fought as a mercenary, helping local freedom fighters secure independence for their nation. There, he built a second Metal Gear and once again sought to bring chaos to the world.
Big Boss believed that from this chaos would emerge a soldier’s Utopia—a place where warriors would be able to discover their true selves. But Snake, called in by the US government, crushed Big Boss’s plans once more. Then, when Snake faced his former commander, he learned the identity of his father—from his elder’s dying words.
At Shadow Moses, Liquid made one demand of Washington—he wanted Big Boss’s body.
Genes inform many traits—intelligence, personality, physique. One study suggested that some traits usually dismissed as entirely cultural or acquired post-birth—including political leanings—are decided to a certain extent by hereditary factors. Big Boss’s genetic code contained the “right stuff ” for soldiers, and his body was kept preserved in the Pentagon, a virtual library of soldier genes.
Through a method of gene therapy, Big Boss’s genetic traits were given to select special forces soldiers. These soldiers would form the Next-Generation Special Forces, also known as the Genome Soldiers.
The Genome Soldiers were among Liquid’s FOXHOUND forces at the insurrection on Shadow Moses Island. Once again, Snake, the man who made the impossible possible, was forced into duty.
But the Pentagon’s true goal was only to send in Snake as a vector for a deadly virus—FOXDIE.
The virus, a biological weapon designed by Dr. Naomi Hunter with ATGC Corp on behalf of the Pentagon, responded to individuals with specific strings of genetic code, inducing apoptosis in the heart and subsequent cardiac arrest.
Snake’s orders—to rescue DARPA chief Donald Anderson and the president of ArmsTech, Kenneth Baker, and to prevent the launch of the nuclear warheads—were an outright lie. FOXDIE killed Baker and, finally, took Liquid’s life as well.
I met Snake during the course of those events. As a scientist—or I guess I could say the chief engineer—I assisted Snake and threw myself into the battle to make the world a slightly less awful place.
After the events on Shadow Moses, Snake and I worked to combat the worldwide spread of Metal Gear derivatives. At the marine decontamination facility Big Shell, off the coast of Manhattan, we learned of the existence of the shadow network called “the Patriots” that controlled not only America, but the entire world. After that, we shifted focus from being “anti-Metal Gear” to being “anti-Patriots.”
Snake and I have been together for a long time now. This is the story of the last battle of Solid Snake—my lifelong friend, the man who met that geeky robot-obsessed scientist Hal Emmerich on Shadow Moses and changed his life forever.
Snake grew tired of being called a hero, but I’m going to call him one anyway. Solid Snake was a real legend—to me, and to many others.
I want you to know his story.