Simple question, right? Snake is the guy you play as in most of the Metal Gear games. Easy.
Well, no. There are a few Snake’s and honestly, it’s way more convoluted than that. Trust us, we’ve had to read-up on it a lot over the years. Now, as we embark upon a new play-through of Metal Gear Solid (it runs great on the Steam Deck, by the way!). It seems like a good time to try and clear things up a little. We’ll do the best we can, ok?
Hideo Kojima made the Metal Gear series and easy to follow as he did with Death Stranding……bear that in mind.
Snake? Snake!
Hideo Kojima’s defining masterpiece is less of a straightforward military saga and more of a glorious, tangled knot of genetic existentialism. At the centre of this beautiful madness sits Snake, a moniker shared by several men whose lives overlap, collide, and fracture across a half-century of proxy wars and shadow government conspiracies.
Unravelling how these men came to be, and how their destinies cross paths, requires stepping straight into the heart of gaming’s most famously intricate soap opera.
The Original Template
Every Snake in the Metal Gear franchise traces his origin back to Naked Snake, the operative who would eventually become the legendary Big Boss.
Operating during the height of the Cold War in 1964, Naked Snake earned his iconic title by surviving the nightmare of Operation Snake Eater and executing his beloved mentor, The Boss.
Disillusioned by how governments manipulate loyal soldiers, Big Boss abandoned his homeland to build a sanctuary for mercenaries without borders. His ambition to create a world where soldiers always had a place to fight turned him from a decorated military hero into a global threat, setting the stage for every tragedy that followed.
The Clones of Les Enfants Terribles
Fearing the loss of their ultimate icon, the shadowy cabal known as The Patriots launched the Les Enfants Terribles (The Terrible Children) project in 1972. Using Big Boss’s DNA, they produced three genetic sons designed to inherit his combat brilliance.
Solid Snake was raised to believe he was the inferior clone, burdened with all of Big Boss’s recessive genes, though he would ultimately prove that sheer willpower beats genetic destiny.
Liquid Snake inherited the dominant genetic traits, yet grew up poisoned by a deep-seated resentment, convinced he was the discarded, genetically inferior product.
Solidus Snake emerged as the perfect balanced clone, complete with accelerated ageing that allowed him to masquerade as a middle-aged politician and eventually serve as the President of the United States under the alias George Sears.
The Phantom Impostor
Before the clones took centre stage, another man assumed the mantle in the shadows. Venom Snake, the protagonist of Metal Gear Solid V, was never a true Snake at all.
He was an elite combat medic who was hypnotised, biologically modified, and psychologically rewritten to believe he was Big Boss himself. While the true Big Boss built his hidden military state behind the scenes, Venom Snake served as his body double, taking the fall during the events of the original Outer Heaven uprising in 1995 when Solid Snake was sent in on a supposed suicide mission.
Nobody said Metal Gear was an easy-to-follow narrative!
The Crossovers and Clashes
The narrative genius of the series lies in how these paths relentlessly cross and tear each other apart. Solid Snake spent his early career unknowingly killing his father’s phantom, Venom Snake, at Outer Heaven, before facing and apparently killing the real Big Boss in Zanzibar Land.
Years later during the Shadow Moses incident (Metal Gear Solid), Solid Snake was pitted against his bitter twin, Liquid Snake, who sought to reclaim what he believed was his stolen birthright.
When Liquid succumbed to the engineered FOXDIE virus, his story did not end. His arm was surgically grafted onto the mercenary Revolver Ocelot, giving rise to Liquid Ocelot, a psychic fusion that manipulated events to overthrow The Patriots once and for all. Solidus Snake stepped into the fray during the Big Shell incident, clashing with both Solid Snake and a young operative named Raiden, whom Solidus had raised as a child soldier.
The entire grand tragedy reached its climax in Metal Gear Solid 4. Aged rapidly into Old Snake, Solid Snake navigated a world controlled by AI networks, fighting off Liquid Ocelot’s grand insurrection.
In a final, poignant confrontation at the graveyard where it all began, an elderly Big Boss reunited with his ageing clone son. With the Patriots’ system destroyed, Big Boss finally made peace with his legacy and his fatherhood before dying beside the grave of The Boss, leaving Solid Snake to live out his final days not as a weapon, but as a free man.
Metal Gear
So, yeah. You have a Snake that’s not even genetically a Snake. You have 3 clones with different traits. One original Big Boss.
Playing as some of them, fighting against some of them. Seeing them live on in a variety of ways. Metal Gear Solid is anything but straight-forward. Moreover, the character of “Snake” isn’t a singular, simple story.
We love it all the more for it’s complexity, sure. But from the outside looking-in, we’re just Snake, so it must just be the same dude from the other games, right?
We can’t type the word snake any more, it’s become excessive. Just know that there’s more than one primary protagonist in the Metal Gear series, despite looking similar and having the same name.
We hope that helps a little?
