This is an IGN opinion piece from Carlos Morales. He’s a long-time fan of the Metal Gear franchise and is an advocate for video games as an artform.
Metal Gear Solid may not be the biggest franchise nowadays, but it was one of the pillars of the first three PlayStation console generations. The adventures of the legendary Solid Snake and his counterparts were not just some of the most critically acclaimed and financially successful games on their respective platforms – they also stand as fantastic and emotional works of art. And what a game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is, marking its 25th anniversary this year as somehow having become only more relevant and timely now than it was upon its original release on November 13th, 2001.
Series creator Hideo Kojima may have since moved on to new IPs like Death Stranding and his upcoming espionage action game Physint, but the iconic game director’s narrative idiosyncrasies and uncanny ability to predict how society will develop have rarely felt as fully formed as they do in Metal Gear Solid’s first PlayStation 2 entry. Let’s take a look at why MGS2 was so ahead of its time.
Raiden High
To understand MGS2’s place in contemporary culture, we first have to look at it in a historical context. It may be hard to remember now after so many years of reappraisal, but MGS2 proved somewhat divisive on its initial release. The game received excellent reviews and sold more than seven million copies, but it also attracted controversy for its choice of protagonist and its convoluted storyline. Many fans were upset that most of the game was spent playing as new hero Raiden instead of Snake, and that the game was full of long cutscenes and Codec calls where characters spoke at length about philosophical and sociological issues. In a world that was still getting used to constant internet access becoming more prevalent and was uncertain about what social changes the digital age would bring, MGS2 was a complex game that many in the gaming space, both consumer and professional, didn’t know how to process.
Even IGN’s Ed Lewis said as much in his review of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater back in 2004, writing that MGS2’s story was of little interest “unless you really want to spend a couple of late, smoky nights going over the details and putting all the pieces together, and they do fit together. While that's kind of interesting if you want a pleasant mind rutting, it was far from fun to watch a game eat itself.”
But time has been kind to MGS2, because many of the topics Kojima explored in the game would become more relevant in the years that followed. The ways social media, the proliferation of digital misinformation for political purposes, and the normalization of automated warfare, deep fakes, and generative AI would turn rifts between demographics into chasms and create a society where many have a tenuous grasp on what reality even is, were all predicted years in advance by Kojima’s landmark title.
Many of the topics Kojima explored in the game would become more relevant in the years that followed.MGS2 is a dense text, and such works can need time to digest. Raiden may have irritated some players in 2001, but he’s now generally accepted as a worthwhile protagonist in his own right by series fans, although it probably doesn’t hurt that Metal Gear Solid 4 turned him into a badass cyborg ninja. People interested in video games as an artform have often pointed to MGS2’s thematic depth, with the game’s story exploring ideas like social engineering, digital censorship, cyberwarfare, and post-truth society. If you just want a tactical espionage adventure with big twists, stealth gameplay, and epic boss fights, the game delivers on those expectations. Yet players embracing MGS2’s more cerebral attributes has made the game an enduring phenomenon even a quarter century later.
One attribute in particular, its metatextual use of game design elements as part of its storytelling, is a big part of why it’s such an impressive artistic achievement.
Game Plays You
MGS2 opens with a prologue featuring series protagonist Solid Snake infiltrating a tanker in the Hudson River to gather evidence of a new Metal Gear prototype named Ray. His ill-fated mission results in the ship sinking, Metal Gear Ray being stolen by recurring villain Revolver Ocelot, and Snake assumed dead. Fast forward two years to a facility called the Big Shell having been built where the tanker sank, which has been taken over by terrorists called Dead Cell and an army of Russian mercenaries under the command of Solidus Snake, one of Snake’s evil clones. They have the President hostage and are seeking to launch a nuclear strike. Raiden, a new agent of FOXHOUND (the same outfit Snake used to work for), is ordered to rescue the hostages and stop the terrorists. Sounds like a standard setup, but it’s not too long into Raiden’s mission that it becomes obvious something is amiss.
Raiden’s mission to the Big Shell has numerous parallels to Snake’s infiltration of Shadow Moses in Metal Gear Solid 1, with repeated plot events, scripted sequences, and character appearances. As the game goes on, the player learns that the entire incident has been orchestrated by a shadow group known as the Patriots, who have covertly controlled the United States government for decades. They’ve also controlled Raiden’s life for years, with his girlfriend Rosemary (who also saves the game for you) being a Patriot agent. The allusions to Shadow Moses are intentional, part of an artificial intelligence simulation system designed to control human behavior and generate desired outcomes. Kojima explicitly makes this plot twist a metaphor for how video game players are conditioned to perform certain actions by subconsciously responding to design choices, with most linear, narrative driven games like the MGS series giving players little to no choice but to do exactly what the developers intend.
Kojima’s metatextual take on the mechanics of game design predates games like BioShock or Spec Ops: The Line.Kojima’s metatextual take on the mechanics of game design predates similar attempts to tie player agency (or lack thereof) into the storytelling of games like BioShock or Spec Ops: The Line. Later levels draw attention to simulational and constructed aspects of video game structure, such as the reveal that the Colonel who Raiden has been taking orders from all game long is one of the Patriots’ AIs, or a big fight on an elevator trying to trick players with a fake Mission Failed screen. Even the environments themselves become less “real” inside the cavernous halls of Arsenal Gear, the flying fortress the terrorists seek to use. The levels have a similar design and color scheme to the VR training missions from the first game, and the room where Raiden battles a fleet of Metal Gear Rays is a surreal space that seems to go on for eternity.
These and other parts of Metal Gear Solid 2 are as interesting to experience now as they were on release. Yet the area where the game is most relevant in 2026 is how it reflects the distorted reality of the mid-2020s.
He Tried To Tell Us
It’s strange to play a video game from 2001 and see it predict the last decade of social upheaval. The gears of late-stage capitalism in the digital age have seen information control and cultural mythology become the most important weapons of the ruling class. In much the same way that the Patriots seek to restrict the free flow of information using the AI system known as GW, so too have the real world military industrial complex and ruling government bodies weaponized social media, digital news distribution, and automated misinformation infrastructure to make it harder to tell what is real or not to suit the interests of the powers that be. The rise of generative AI has done untold damage to the social contract and our ability to believe literally anything we see online, which is not a great development in a world where not using the internet is no longer really an option.
The anonymous nature of the Patriots, who are nameless entities powerful enough to select the President and set the terms of what becomes human history, speaks to how powerless the average person can feel in the face of endless catastrophe. Sure, there are public punching bags among the billionaires, but the movers and shakers of politics and industry are often faceless corporations and private donors who are difficult to directly assign blame to. More than individuals, the system itself is essentially self-perpetuating to the point that it’s daunting to imagine what the world would look like if it were removed. That’s the rationale for President Johnson’s insistence that Raiden continues to battle Solidus even once the Patriots’ deception is exposed, because Solidus’ plan to destroy the Patriots could tip the world into chaos.
Even more distressing is how much of the Patriots’ rhetoric makes sense from a logical standpoint. In a famous speech near the end of the game, the AI Colonel claims that the Patriots don’t censor information for power’s sake, but for the greater good of a society that is becoming directionless under an overwhelming amount of data in the digital era. In the Patriots’ view, “all this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate” has fractured our grip on collective reality, making it impossible for people to determine what is “true” because the internet rewards polarization and insular thinking with positive reinforcement over objectivity or context. As the Colonel says, “the different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right.” Check any social media feed or comment section in 2026 and it’s hard to disagree with him.
But MGS2 doesn’t end with the Patriots. It ends with Raiden, a man who has learned everything he’s been programmed to think was a lie, asking what he’s supposed to believe in. Snake tells him to “find the meaning behind the words, then decide. You can find your own name, and your own future.” It’s what makes Raiden’s choice to accept Rosemary back into his life and believe her when she says that she truly did fall in love with him despite being a spy for the Patriots such a fitting resolution. No matter how much the rich and powerful try to determine society’s direction, everyone has the ability to make their own choices and decide what is meaningful to them. It’s a beautiful message that resonates even more today when we’re all trying to survive the turbulent reality we find ourselves in. That Kojima ends a military action game about existentialism by basically telling the player to go touch grass is just another example of why he’s one of the best to ever do it.
Carlos Morales has been writing about sci-fi, superhero movies, and video games since 2019, and has read 10,000 comic books. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.