Hideo Kojima Reveals Original Plan For Key Metal Gear Solid 3 Boss Fight

There’s been plenty of chatter about Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater recently. Many people think the game is in line for a remaster/remake treatment, and whether it happens is up in the air. After all, the man behind the game, Hideo Kojima, has long since left Konami, and Konami hasn’t touched the franchise since their disastrous survival game “set in its universe.” However, the rumors continue, making it all the more interesting when Kojima himself pops up to drop info. Not on the remake/remaster news, but on the original plans for the game when it came out years ago.

Hideo Kojima dropped a thread on Twitter where he outlined how one of the boss fights in Metal Gear Solid 3 was supposed to be much grander in scale than what we got. The boss fight in question was with the sniper known as The End. What made this fight so important to the game was the large map that you got to be on. Both he and Naked Snake had sniper rifles, and you had to give it your all to beat the veteran sniper.

But as Kojima reveals, while he did open up the playing field to make it feel like a true “sniper fight,” his initial plan was to make the area even larger! He wanted it to be a back-and-forth struggle with multiple areas to fight in so that only the best of the two would walk out alive.

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MGS1 also has sniper fights, but they are more video game-oriented in enclosed spaces, as is the sniper event on the bridge in MGS2. MGS3 is a jungle, so I planned a full-scale Stephen Hunter-esque sniper fight on a huge map with multiple areas to go back and forth. https://t.co/qe2ZN9Gntz
— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) April 18, 2023

Given what would happen with Kojima, you might think Konami stepped in and trimmed the boss fight down for budget reasons. But that’s not the case. In another tweet, Kojima revealed:

“But when I experimented with it, I found it unbalanced with the back and forth boss fights, so I eventually shrunk it.”

As many fans noted in the comments, the fight with The End is truly a test of player skill. So much so that many, including myself, took the “cheat” route and used another tactic to beat him. In true Kojima fashion, he made it so that The End was literally on the clock. If you moved the clock on your PlayStation ahead eight days, you could let The End die of old age, thus skipping the fight entirely. Naked Snake even references that when you go and meet him.

But for those who beat The End honorably, we salute you, and we know you appreciated what Kojima did with this boss fight.