It’s been weeks since Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain was released and new secrets are still getting released. This one skirts a legal area, and no, it’s not the hackers who are doing so.
Hackers figured out that Hideo Kojima hid the code to an incomplete ROM for The Portopia Serial Murder Case. This code has been hidden between Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain. To complete it, hackers looked for a value within the color a some strange barcodeklike lens flares Kojima used in some cutscenes.
The Portopia Serial Murder Case is an adventure game from famed developer Yuji Horii, originally released on the NEC PC-6001 in 1983, and more famously ported by Chunsoft for the Famicom. You are the private investigator tasked with finding the person who killed a bank president, Kouzou Yamakawa, With the help of your assistant, Yasu, you travel across real life cities Kobe, Kyoto, and Sumoto, interrogating potential witnesses and suspects and scouring rooms for clues.
It’s not clear if Kojima had a hidden meaning for adding the code in, but it should be safe to assume he knew enough about the hacking and modding community that he intentionally put the code in for them to find. Kojima has gone on record that The Portopia Serial Murder Case, along with Super Mario Bros, convinced him to enter the video game industry.
The Portopia Serial Murder Case sold one million units in spite of never leaving Japan, and Kojima’s fondness for plot twists came from his love of this game as well. Perhaps this itself is a metagame of Kojima’s creation, with the hope that fans will find where it goes next? Fans are still actively playing with the code, so this may not be the last you read about this Easter egg.
Why do you think Kojima hid the code of a 32 year old game in his last Konami hit? Share your thoughts with us in the comments
