What is Metal Gear Solid, and what is The Twin Snakes?
Metal Gear Solid launched in Japan in September 1998 and in the West that autumn, taking Solid Snake to Shadow Moses Island in Alaska, where his old unit FOXHOUND, now rogue, has seized a nuclear facility and the walking tank Metal Gear REX. Voice acting throughout, a Psycho Mantis boss who reads the player's memory card, and a codec full of long conversations made it the defining argument that games could carry cinema weight without leaving the controller idle.
The game sold over six million copies and set the series' modern shape: the soliton radar, the cardboard box, the health bar boss duels and the anti nuclear message wrapped in a conspiracy plot. Its two disc PlayStation release, with the VR missions expanded separately in some regions, is one of the most recognizable game objects of its decade.
The Twin Snakes, released for GameCube in 2004, remade the game through a three way collaboration: Nintendo published, Silicon Knights developed, and Kojima's team supervised, with film director Ryuhei Kitamura restaging the cutscenes in a far more acrobatic action style. The remake grafts Metal Gear Solid 2's first person aiming, hanging and lockers onto Shadow Moses, which makes it play better and argue worse: fans still debate whether the new cutscenes betray the original's tone.
As physical objects the two could not differ more in market shape. The PlayStation original was printed in the millions in black label, Greatest Hits and regional variants, while The Twin Snakes, a single platform late GameCube exclusive, had a far smaller print run and has become one of the GameCube's premium titles in the West. Japanese and Western covers differ for both games.
Guides followed the fame: the PlayStation game received major official guides in Japan and the West, including scenario and data books in Japan that document Shadow Moses room by room, and The Twin Snakes received its own Western guide keyed to the remake's changed mechanics. Matching guide to version matters here more than anywhere else in the series, because the remake's solutions do not always solve the original.
