Does Metal Gear Solid 3 Really Need to Be Remade?

By Grace Benfell | August 21, 2025 | 1:30pm

Video Games Features Metal Gear Solid

Does Metal Gear Solid 3 Really Need to Be Remade?

Why remake Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater?

In a certain sense, the answer is obvious. It’s still arguably the most beloved game in the franchise. Besides the original Metal Gear Solid, every other game in the series is some degree of controversial (or just old enough to be too friction forward for a modern player). It’s also the series’ heart, the entry that pumps meaning through every other. It’s the rare prequel that makes its predecessors feel stranger and deeper. The Boss’s misguided mission is perhaps still Hideo Kojima’s most profound idea; a nation of soldiers free from the state is absurd and yet appallingly resonant. The game’s final image of protagonist Big Boss saluting at the Boss’s grave has been parodied and cheaply referenced over and over because it is a moment of sheer sentimental force. It is impossible to think of it without feeling something. If Metal Gear Solid Delta merely competently recreates the original, it will inherit profound emotional import.

The remake is also in vogue. Whether loyal, as Delta purports to be, or only the same game in fits and starts, like Silent Hill 2, remakes have dominated the release schedule and the discourse of video games for years. The Resident Evil 2 remake has essentially replaced the original in the public imagination. They would likely not phrase it this way, but in some sense certain people like older games more. Beyond the nostalgia of youth, games felt like a fairer purchase In the past. Metal Gear Solid 3 is free of micro-transactions. It is an expansive adventure with plenty of secrets, but also something you could get through in a couple of weekends. It ties into the other games in the series, but tells a complete story on its own. Most of these were standard features back in 2004, but can feel totally novel now. Much has been made of Mafia: The Old Country’s 12 hour campaign, for example.

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Another factor is that Metal Gear has floundered since Kojima’s exit from Konami. The publisher’s one stab at a post-Kojima Metal Gear was the fascinating, but deadening, Survive. Something of a shambling prodigal son, it populated the now vacant world of Metal Gear Solid V with zombies and fog. It was even more shaped by the survival game boom than its predecessor. Though it has its defenders, people largely hated it.

In Leigh Alexander’s poetic, meandering Metal Gear Solid 3 retrospective from 2014, she describes how surprising it was to set the game in a wild, relatively open space: “The ambitious, rebellious act of taking ‘level design’ outside of the familiar military buildings and molecular structures of the previous two games and depositing you, the eager player, into the wilderness. At the time MGS3 was unveiled, we’d never seen a character’s crawl physics adapt to uneven land before, to weave, snakelike, over its peaks and hollows rather than to skim along its geometry superficially.”

In 2014, this was already a well-established mode of video game interaction, and Breath of the Wild hadn’t even come out yet. Now it is more-or-less standard. Death Stranding is arguably one of the most substantial elaborations on this element of MGS3, using its detailed landscapes to mark careful footfalls and sheer inclines. But Ubisoft and Nintendo alike have stolen from Kojima’s visions. The open world model has eaten MGS3 alive, digesting down its subsystems. Metal Gear Solid 3 was the future and now we’ve come full circle. The ubiquity of its influence means even a faithful remake won’t feel too foreign to the average player now.

But setting aside business and practical concerns, is there a fuzzier reason to remake Metal Gear Solid 3? A more political or even spiritual reason?

In this light, the more obvious re-visitation is Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Like Death Stranding, it is a game for which Kojima has been called a prophet. Its obsession with systems of surveillance, with capitalist myth-making recreating itself, and with the military applications of simulation make it still cutting. Mind you, the game released two months after 9/11 and it comments on many of the peculiarities and horrors of the war on terror. You could even frame a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3, with its nostalgic references to early James Bond films and its evocation of cold war paranoia, as a regressive move as compared to the stern warning of MGS2.

This is not an unfair evaluation. MGS3 does embrace a myth of the soldier’s nobility. Both Boss and Big Boss are essentially workers, caught in systems which hide information from them, use them, and then kill them. There is something absurd about framing imperialism’s agents as its most exploited. But the resonance of Kojima’s work comes from these sorts of absurdities. MGS3, at its most basic level, is a game about how nations are weapons for killing.

The “river of death” sequence illustrates this forcefully. In this dreamy moment, each and every soldier the player kills over the course of the game marches towards them in a dried up riverbank. Most of these deaths, outside of the game’s boss battles, are optional. That fact makes it a profound condemnation. You can play MGS3 however you want, but you will have to wade through the lives you took. But still, if you spare every person you can, the game ends the same. There is no real alternate path. Alexander pitches the game as “the only war game where mastery is dictated not by how many people you shoot, but how few.” This is true. And that truth does not belie what Big Boss is. He is still a soldier. Soldiers kill.

There is a presumption in this article that Konami is remaking Metal Gear Solid 3 because it speaks to this moment, whether that be a function of a business noticing trends or one of aesthetic and political resonance. But that resonance is already there. It always was. You can still play MGS3 in a form close to its original state, for far cheaper than you can buy Delta. I’m writing this now, because I’m hopeful that more people will read it, because of Delta’s imminent release. But I could have written most of it anytime since I first played it over 10 years ago. We should not have to embrace a hype cycle to see what truth awaits us in the past. We don’t have to.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.