There are many stories that one could tell about the saga featuring Solid Snake and all those connected to him both in the video game universe he was born in and the real world via the people who made him. The tale of Konami, Kojima, and those in between is anything but a straightforward tale, and that goes double when you look at a game like Metal Gear Solid 4. That title took years to come out, and when it arrived, people were stunned by what Hideo Kojima had accomplished. However, many wished it didn’t only come out to the PS3.
But that’s where a fun twist comes in. For a time, there was potential for it to come out on Xbox 360. Moreover, the Konami team under Kojima worked hard to make that happen.
The reveal comes from assistant producer Ryan Payton, who was one of many who took part in “The Ultimate History of Video Games Vol 2.” Here is what he had to say about this endeavor:
“Despite how downtrodden my colleagues were with developing on PS3, most of them were still hardcore Sony fans and were not in favour of spending resources on such a test. They believed Metal Gear Solid 4 would look and run terribly on Microsoft’s older and inferior hardware. One fateful day, the Konami R&D team hosted a meeting where we got to see the fruits of their labour – Metal Gear Solid 4 running beautifully and smoothly on an Xbox 360.”
That’s good to hear, and it shows that sometimes you simply need to try something to see if it’ll work rather than thinking it’ll fail.
But you might wonder, “If they got it to run smoothly on the 360, why wasn’t it ported there?” Well, as it would turn out, it had to do with hardware.
Specifically, the disks that the Xbox 360 used. If you don’t recall, at the time, there was a “mini-war” going on between Microsoft and Sony about the “future of disks.” Microsoft was high on HD-DVD style discs, while Sony liked Blu-Ray. As it would turn out, Blu-Ray discs had a memory capacity of over 54 GB, while DVDs could only hold over 8.
That meant a port would need multiple discs to contain everything in the game for Xbox 360 players. Konami wasn’t up for doing that, and thus the PS3 was the one that got the title.
It’s a bit ironic, but that’s sometimes how the gaming industry goes.
