Games

6 Metal Gear Solid 5 plot points you need to know

All the important bits from Naked Snake’s previous espionage exploits explained...

Written by Ben Sillis

6 min readPublished on 10.12.2016 · 12:08 UTC

Ready to get sneaking? The somewhat ridiculously titled Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes is out now on PS4, PS3, Xbox One and Xbox 360. It’s been a long time coming - the last major canon instalment on home console landed all the way back in 2008 - so what do you do if you can’t quite remember how we left off? Or haven’t played the canonical PSP editions? Worry not: we’re here to fill you in.

Ground Zeroes takes place in 1975, putting it in the first half of the series’ epic timeline. Hideo Kojima’s world is nothing if not complex though, meaning there’s already a lot to keep in check. If you’re in need of a refresher course, we’ve picked out the salient bits of the story from every title leading up to this game’s events. Be warned: here be serious series spoilers...

Just who is Naked Snake?

Naked Snake is the star of several games set in the series’ fictionalised 1960s-80s time period, and he lives a very complicated life in which everybody frequently lies to him, because that’s just how things were done during the Cold War, apparently. Chronologically, the first time we see Snake is in 1964, during the events of the PS2’s Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Throughout the game, the true purpose of his mission gets exposed in dribs and drabs until it’s eventually revealed that he’s actually been deployed to Russia to kill ‘The Boss’ - his seemingly-rogue mentor, who he’s a little bit in love with.

Killing The Boss upsets Snake quite a bit, but lots of subsequent missions and treacheries throughout the 70s and 80s only make his mistrust of government worse. By killing her, he garners the moniker ‘Big Boss’, a title he reluctantly accepts before running off to Africa in the late 1980s to build Outer Heaven - a militant nation free from political agendas. At this point the US naturally sees him as a bit of a villain, so they send in Solid Snake, his secretly cloned son, to sort things out. And that’s where the events of the NES’ Metal Gear 1 and 2, followed by Metal Gear Solid 1, 2 and 4, carry on from.

The Philosophers = filthy rich

The Philosophers in Kojima’s world are a bit like the Illuminati, and their amassed wealth is what kicks the whole series into action. Created in the 1920s, the organisation was a supergroup comprised of the most crazy-rich and influential members of the US, China and the USSR. They drove the political and military agenda for decades, until WWII caused a bit of a rift among the ranks. Things got worse during the Cold War, when their bounty, ‘The Philosophers’ Legacy’, went missing…

Everyone wants the Legacy

The Legacy was, unbeknownst to Naked Snake at the time, the driving force behind everything that played out with The Boss in Russia in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. See, it turns out the Boss hadn’t actually gone rogue. Instead, she willingly sacrificed herself, playing the part of baddie as an excuse to send Snake into Russia to get The Philosophers’ Legacy. Geddit? Either way, The Legacy is the Philosophers’ kitty in the form of a mysterious microfilm: a sum of $100 billion that the group used to control the world with. By the time we get to Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes, the Legacy has been on quite a journey. It was in Russia up until the end of Snake Eater, in which Major Ocelot (more on him in a minute) stole half and duly delivered it to the CIA. Only to steal it back again later…

Ocelot is generally up to no good

Ocelot appears in almost every part of the Metal Gear story. He’s first seen as a fresh faced major in 1964 (MGS 3), in which he’s apparently working for the KGB. This being Metal Gear, though, nothing is as it seems: he was actually a double agent working for the CIA and, oddly enough, he’s also The Boss’ son. In 1970, he kills the Director of Intelligence at the CIA, taking the half of the Philosopher’s Legacy - the $50 billion he secured for them earlier. With that, he begins to set up his own clandestine group, named the Patriots. Ocelot’s life takes a turn for the bizarre in the Solid Snake-centred Metal Gear series, but that’s all yet to happen as far as Ground Zeroes is concerned. Oh, and he’s quite handy with a revolver.

The Patriots are the new Philosophers

Like the Philosophers, the Patriots want to control the face of war, the global economy and the world at large. Is that so much to ask, really? With the help of Major Zero (head of Naked Snake’s super spy unit FOX) and his ill-gotten cash, Ocelot forms the group in the early 70s. Naked Snake is also involved, but scarpers in 1974 when he finds out that Major Zero has, rudely, tried to clone him. It soon transpires that the Patriots are quite big on that kind of thing: the cloning goes on to produce Liquid and Solid Snake, the stars of the latter Metal Gear Solid games, while the data from their pet test tube soldier Frank Jaeger (who later becomes Gray Fox), creates a new breed of genome soldiers, swathes of which Solid ends up sneaking around and killing. In other words: the Patriots are bad. They also go by the name ‘La Li Lu Le Lo’, for a reason that’s never offered.

There will always be new Metal Gears

Metal Gears are giant walking battle tanks, and every game in the series has at least one. Throughout the MGS timeline their design continually evolves, from crude metal monsters to agile, dinosaur-like, watermelon stomping nightmares driven by futuristic AI. But the thing they all have in common? They’re always in the hands of the bad guys, and normally represent a nuclear threat to a major global power. Both Naked and Solid Snake have both brought down more of them than you’ve had hot dinners, so expect to have to do the same in Ground Zeroes and the Phantom Pain - we shouldn’t have to wait six years for the latter this time.