There's A Bonus Game Hidden In Metal Gear Solid 3
It's 2004 and you are playing the recently released Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, the masterpiece follow-up to one of the greatest games of all time.
You've made your way through most of the game, survived the jungle, defeated most of the Cobra Unit, are well on your way to destroying the Shagohod, and preventing World War 3.
You have infiltrated the enemy facility, but unfortunately, your disguise only gets you so far. You get found out and captured by Colonel Volgin. What follows is some pretty gruesome torture, where Snake loses a lot of blood and an eye for good measure. Once you are back in control, Snake is in a prison cell.
It's heavy stuff, so might be a good time to save your game and come back to this tomorrow. You save your game, hear Paramedic's story about Renfield and Dracula, and you turn the game off.
The next day, you turn on your PS2, load up your Metal Gear Solid 3 save file, and find yourself in a sepia-toned warehouse. You are no longer Snake, you are some strange man in a trench coat with cross-shaped swords. Mutated cops rush at your with hook swords, where you have to hack and slash your way through them to survive. What the hell just happened?
What Is Metal Gear Solid 3's Secret Game?
Click to enlargeHideo Kojima does nothing by halves. During the development of Metal Gear Solid 3, it was decided to include a mini-game, which would appear as Snake's dream while he recovered from torture.
Fun fact, Konami trademarked the concept of including smaller games during loading screens, hence why you could play Galaxian while waiting for your next race in Ridge Racer, and why that feature never appeared in other games.
The idea was roughly the same here, Snake would dream of the game Gradius, then wake with a start. It was meant as an easter egg more than anything, but a fun one that players would likely stumble into unknowingly in these early days of the internet.
At some point, Kojima included a snippet of an entirely original game. Paramedic's tale of Dracula, something Snake has quite the phobia of, triggers Snake's nightmare about fighting vampires, or being a vampire, it is hard to tell. The dream is unclear.
In it, we play as what can only be described as a Guilty Gear character with 70% fewer chains, fighting off hordes of disturbing creatures that are humanoid in shape and wearing police uniforms while wielding hook swords.
The player can jump, dash, and attack with the swords. As you defeat enemies, the character's hair turns white, eventually transforming into an animalistic creature that rips enemies apart. Who this strange warrior is a mystery. Our best guess at his name comes from the working title given to this potential game, "Guy Savage".
Why Did Kojima Include This Bizarre Minigame?
Click to enlargeWhatever Guy Savage was, we know there were plans to expand it into something more. Kojima was cagey about the game's existence at first, feigning ignorance when asked about its presence in Metal Gear Solid 3.
As time went on, he opened up more, revealed that the original plan was to use Gradius in the dream, that Guy Savage was actually created from a cancelled prototype for Zone of the Enders 3, and that there were plans to give Savage into its own game. All of this fell through, and so, Guy Savage remained a dream.
Since then, the Guy Savage nightmare has not appeared in Metal Gear Solid 3. It was not present in the 3DS version or the HD collection released in 2011. Paramedic will still frighten Snake with her tale of Dracula visiting him in his cell, but if Snake has any nightmares, we are no longer privy to them.
Guy Savage is one of the most interesting and unusual Easter eggs in all of video game history, and in a way, because it never became anything more, it gets to live on as the wonderfully strange story that it is.
