A former Kojima Productions staff member who worked on Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, has revealed that at one point, Konami had the PS3-exclusive game running on Xbox 360 hardware and very well could have released it on Microsoft’s platform if not for a very mundane issue.
In a nearly two-year-old interview with author Steven L. Kent for his book, The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2, that has found traction since being picked up by Time Extension, Ryan Payton makes the claim that – contrary to what most would believe, and even some of Sony’s messaging at the time – Metal Gear Solid 4 was not a PlayStation 3 exclusive because of any agreement between Konami and Sony. In fact, Konami was testing an Xbox 360 version during development.
The issue, Payton describes, wasn’t with getting the game to play on Microsoft’s hardware, in fact he says that it was running “beautifully” on the Xbox 360.
“Despite how downtrodden my colleagues were with developing on PS3, most of them were still hardcore Sony fans and were not in favour of spending resources on such a test,” Payton says in the book. “They believed MGS4 would look and run terribly on Microsoft’s older and inferior hardware. One fateful day, the Konami R&D team hosted a meeting where we got to see the fruits of their labour – Metal Gear Solid 4 running beautifully and smoothly on an Xbox 360. As one of the few unabashed Xbox fans in the office, I was excited.”
Instead, it was the issue of fitting a 50GB game originally designed for the PS3’s higher-capacity blu-ray discs on the 360’s ageing DVD format. Konami reportedly wasn’t keen on spreading the game across multiple discs, and so ultimately canned the idea.
While we may never see Metal Gear Solid 4 running on an Xbox console, we do have the upcoming multiplatform releases of both a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and a re-hashed Metal Gear Solid HD Collection to look forward to.
