WTF?! Hideo Kojima’s games have a deserved reputation for being unconventional. But there was almost a sequence in Metal Gear Solid 3 that would have gone beyond anything else—and not in a good way: a boss battle that was supposed to last two real-time weeks.
As reported by Kotaku, the latest episode of Did You Know Gaming discusses content that had been cut from the Metal Gear Solid series, based on old interviews and books. It includes weapons that were just too weird to make it into a game, story elements that were abandoned, and game sequences that were removed and turned into cutscenes.
But the most interesting tale comes from a planned boss battle sequence in Metal Gear Solid 3 that was so bad it led to developers booing Kojima.
According to the video, narrated by none other than Solid Snake himself, actor David Hayter, Kojima had become infatuated with the works of novelist Stephen Hunter during the production of Metal Gear Solid 3. The author’s books, The Master Sniper and Point of Impact, are about snipers embedded in the mountains trying to take each other out.
Kojima wanted this realism to be part of Metal Gear Solid 3. The idea was that Snake’s boss fight with The End would take two weeks, that’s two actual, real-time weeks. Players would have to stay silent and hidden using their surroundings while searching for clues to help them discover where The End was hiding. Once a player identified the location, it was time to set up the kill shot.
The concept did make it into the prototype stage, but everyone who played it could not find any trace of the old sniper despite spending hours on end searching for clues. It was so dull that the team started booing Kojima, convincing him to rethink the section. A wise move, considering how awful it sounds.
It’s actually possible to beat The End easily by either killing him early on in the game or by changing the console clock, putting it forward two weeks so he dies of old age.
Kojima’s most famous video game sequence is probably the fourth wall-breaking battle with Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid. Not only does Mantis read the player’s memory card and comment on any certain save files, mentioning some games by name, but players also have to physically switch the controller’s port (on the PlayStation or GameCube) to prevent him from evading Snake’s attacks.