With the release of Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2, Japanese publisher Konami has finally made right with gaming history: the new collection marks the first time that Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, got a second release after its original launch on the PlayStation 3…in 2008.
The milestone has made some of the younger gamers confused, though: Metal Gear is a franchise with a lot of lore, spanning several games and connecting several characters both on and off screen. So a deep dive into the entire canon of legendary agent Solid Snake is due, making this a good History lesson for some of our readers.
To help navigate this winding narrative, we map out Snake’s exact ages and contexts of life during his major operations and the crucial transitional periods that explain his shifting status between them. Now, some of the games below are not in the second volume of the collection (they came out in the first edition, last year), but we feel like including them would make for a better context for your read. Also, there are tons of smaller details that, for the sake of article size, we’ll purposefully keep out of this piece.
Finally, considering we’re diving into story details, consider this your only spoiler warning.
| Game | Snake’s age in that game |
| Metal Gear | 23 |
| Metal Gear 2 | 27 |
| Metal Gear Solid | 33 |
| Metal Gear Solid 2 | 35 |
| Metal Gear Solid 4 | 42 |
Metal Gear
- Original release: 1987
- Platforms: MSX2, later ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) that same year
The very first Metal Gear game is set in 1995, when a 23-year-old Solid Snake, a rookie recently recruited by the high-tech special forces unit FOXHOUND, is deployed on his first major combat mission, Operation Intrude N313.
Armed with only a wireless radio, the young commando must execute a solo infiltration into the heavily fortified mercenary state of Outer Heaven, a rogue nation established in South Africa, to rescue his veteran squadmate, Gray Fox, who had been sent there before him but disappeared amidst rumors of Outer Heaven having a devastating new superweapon.
As Snake navigates the deep defenses of the fortress, he receives constant radio guidance from his commander, FOXHOUND’s executive officer (XO) and legendary soldier Big Boss. He successfully frees Gray Fox and uncovers the existence of the TX-55 Metal Gear, a nuclear-armed bipedal walking tank that threatens global security. However, the mission takes a dark turn when Snake discovers that the entire crisis was a trap: Outer Heaven’s leader was none other than Big Boss himself, who was disillusioned with the way the United States treated their soldiers as expendable tools and decided to create a mercenary nation where they would be valued. Since such a nation could not exist under US law, the development of a superweapon would work as a deterrent. Big Boss himself had sent Snake in, expecting him to fail.
However, defying all odds, Snake managed to destroy the active Metal Gear prototype and confront his commander in the depths of the self-destructing facility. In an epic clash, Snake defeated the rogue leader, barely escaping before the entire base got completely demolished. Though victorious on paper, the physical and psychological toll of this mission marks the end of his innocence, leaving him deeply traumatized.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
- Original release: 1990
- Platforms: MSX2, with a later port developed for mobile devices in 2004
After the events of the first game, Snake, now 27 years old, has decided to live in semi-retirement when he is recalled to active duty in 1999. During the four-year interim, his survivor’s guilt had driven him to discharge himself from FOXHOUND, work a brief and disillusioning cover stint with the CIA, and operate as a freelance mercenary before seeking peace. He is brought back by the new FOXHOUND commander, Roy Campbell, to execute Operation Intrude F014, tasked with infiltrating the nation of Zanzibar.
Snake’s objective was simple, though only at surface level: he eas meant to rescue Kio Marv, a kidnapped Czechoslovakian biologist who has engineered OILIX, a revolutionary micro-algae that solves a global energy crisis. Infiltrating Zanzibar’s heavily fortified walls, Snake is shocked to discover that his former comrade and best friend, Gray Fox, has defected and is piloting the updated Metal Gear D. Snake is forced to navigate a web of betrayals, which ultimately leads to the tragic deaths of his closest allies on the battlefield.
The climax of the Zanzibar crisis forces Snake to dismantle the new walking tank and engage in a brutal, hand-to-hand fistfight in a minefield with Gray Fox, leaving his best friend to die. He then faces, once again, Big Boss, finding out that the individual he defeated four years prior was a doppelganger. Now facing the true legendary soldier, Snake improvised a makeshift flamethrower out of a lighter and an aerosol can, burning his former mentor to death, but not before finding out that he was not merely his former commander, but also his biological father.
Metal Gear Solid
- Original release: 1998
- Platforms: PlayStation, with an expanded version titled “Metal Gear Solid: Integral” released in 1999; and a full remake, “The Twin Snakes”, released for the Nintendo GameCube in 2004
Six years after Zanzibar Land, a thirty-three-year-old Snake is dragged back into the military machine. After living in the Alaskan wilderness, his many traumas from previous assignments have led him to develop a severe drinking habit to cope with a quiet life caring for Siberian huskies and sled-dog racing. His peace is shattered when armed soldiers sent by Campbell drag him from his cabin to deal with an armed uprising at an isolated Alaskan nuclear disposal site led by…FOXHOUND.
While dealing with the fact that Snake was now opposing his own former unit, he infiltrated the freezing complex of Shadow Moses Island to rescue DARPA Chief Donald Anderson, as well as ArmsTech president Kenneth Baker. Both were taken hostage by the rebellious unit as they were in negotiations for the development of a new type of nuclear weapon, which turned out to be, you guessed it, a new Metal Gear bipedal tank called “REX”.
Snake eventually found help after saving rookie soldier Meryl Silverburgh—herself a new FOXHOUND recruit who did not agree to the uprising—and REX’s designer, Hal “Otacon” Emmerich. Together, they systematically neutralized FOXHOUND’s Liquid’s elite unit while being stalked by a cognitively fractured Cyborg Ninja, who is shockingly revealed to be the resurrected Gray Fox.
The highest point in this story comes when Snake, deprived of all his weapons and equipment, is forced to engage the new FOXHOUND XO—his previously unknown twin brother, Liquid Snake—in a hand to hand fight to the death atop a destroyed Metal Gear REX, when Liquid reveals the ugly truth about their birth: they were not “sons” of Big Boss, but clones, genetically engineered to preserve the legendary soldier’s legacy in case he went rogue against the United Stated (which, as we have seen, he did). Liquid resents Snake because, according to him, the entire project saw Solid Snake be created with all the dominant genes from Big Boss, while he himself got the recessive ones.
Ultimately, Liquid falls from the wreckage, but survives only to pursue Snake and Meryl (or Otacon and finally succumbs to what was the US’s endgame all along: the mission handlers infected Snake with a targeting retrovirus that would trigger a heart attack in its victims as soon as our hero came into contact with their desired marks—namely, Anderson, Baker, the entire FOXHOUND unit, as well as Liquid himself.
As Liquid dies just before pulling the trigger on Snake, the survivor realized that he, himself, was a potential loose end—one that the virus could be triggered against at any given moment.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
- Original release: PlayStation 2
- Platforms: 2001, with an expanded version called “Substance” launched in 2002
Sons of Liberty introduced new concepts to the Metal Gear franchise: being set in two different chapters years apart, the game also introduces a new protagonist—Raiden. While he is the one to take uo the majority of the game all the way up to its conclusion, though, his part of the mission is largely connected to game’s introduction piece, which is helmed by a jaded, 35-year-old Solid Snake.
Set in 2007, Snake and Otacon, after surviving the events of Shadow Moses, set up a non-governmental organization called “Philantropy”, with the sole mission of erradicating Metal Gear projects throughout the world. That year, the US Marines use an oil tanker to disguise the development of Metal Gear RAY, the most advanced prototype, that not only is able to walk like its predecessors, but also boasts amphibian capacities.
As the tanker traverses the Hudson River in New York, Snake infiltrates it with the objective of photographing and leaking RAY’s existence to the world. As it happens with these endeavors, the mission quickly goes south, as Russian mercenaries led by a man called Sergei Gurlukovich at the behest of Revolver Ocelot, one of Shadow Moses’s FOXHOUND operators under Liquid Snake. Ocelot himself, however, has a different objective: he manages to hijack RAY and sink the tanker, causing a major environmental incident that is framed upon Philantropy as the cause.
Now branded a terrorist organization and with a worldwide warrant on his head, Snake fakes his own death and goes underground, resurfacing two years later, in 2009, under the alias “Iroquois Pliskin” so he can sneak into the Big Shell decontamination facility, a major structure installed where the tanker originally sank and, much like years prior, also serves as disguise to the Arsenal Gear, a massive, submersible fortress that houses not only a series of RAY units, but a secret data-filtering AI system, GW.
All to hide the fact that the United States is an enlarged shadow state, where its ruling powers are chosen by a secret group known as the “Patriots”—including the current and the former president. Is your head still with us? Because it gets more dicey: the former president, George Sears, is none other than Solidus Snake, a third Big Boss clone who’s a perfect copy to the legendary soldier’s genetic data. It is under his leadership that the Big Shell is invaded and taken over by mercenaries, with the objective of exposing them.
While Raiden progresses through Big Shell, defeating all operatives all the way up to Solidus himself, Snake works in parallel to upload a digital worm cluster that disrupts Arsenal Gear. Ocelot, still in action and with the stolen RAY in tow, also joins the fight as the Patriots’ protector, managing to escape but not before Snake dives into the water to plant a tracking device on the unit as well as recovering an encrypted disc containing the supposed locations of the Patriots’ ruling committee, paving the way for a deeper investigation into the shadow cabal controlling global affairs.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
- Original release: 2008
- Platforms: PlayStation 3, with a second, upgraded release in 2026 (finally!) for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X and PC
By 2014, a forty-two-year-old Snake—now operating under the solemn moniker “Old Snake”—is facing the final months of his life. In the five years since the Big Shell incident, his health has entered a state of rapid senescent collapse, leaving his cells biologically equivalent to an eighty-year-old man due to the genetic tampering he was subjected to during his creation. An older Roy Campbell hires him for one last mission: travel across global proxy war zones fought by private military corporations to locate and assassinate Liquid Ocelot—Ocelot’s body taken over by Liquid’s mind—as he plans to hijack the Patriots’ SOP firearm-control network, a system that dictates pretty much everything through several AI-clusters, including the ability (or lack thereof) of any weapon in the world to fire or even people being able to say the word “Patriots”.
Outfitted with a muscle-enhancing OctoCamo suit to offset his severe osteoarthritis and hypertrophic heart, Snake fights through the elite Beauty and the Beast unit, while learning from old friends that his accelerated aging is an intentional, pre-programmed genetic fail-safe engineered during the project that conceived him. Furthermore, the FOXDIE virus inside him is mutating: instead of targeting specific individuals, the genetic markers within the virus’ composition are failing, and now, every single person on the planet may be fair game, effectively turning Snake into a walking biological weapon with the potential to spread a global pandemic.
After a grueling trek through a radioactive microwave corridor, Snake successfully uploads a localized computer virus named FOXALIVE into the Patriot network, permanently dismantling their global control. He defeats Liquid Ocelot in a final hand-to-hand duel before traveling to Arlington Cemetery to commit suicide and prevent the pandemic. There, he is stopped by a figure of his past: Big Boss, still alive and reconstructed with body parts extracted from Solidus’ corpse.
Big Boss explains the final truths of the Patriots, killing the group’s sole survivor and creator, and urging Snake, now referred to by his real name—David—to spend his remaining months living not as a military tool, but peacefully as a free man.
Final Thoughts
The tragic brilliance of the Metal Gear Solid series lies in the weight of its timeline. It is incredibly, absolutely convoluted, highly detailed—and believe me: we’re actually keeping details off—but nothing is shoehorned or forced.
It’s storytelling at its finest, and the fact that it never made into a re-release, in this day and age of remasters and remakes, was not just a clerical error from Konami.
We are just glad this was finally made right.
