Spoiler Warning: If you have not finished Ground Zeroes and don't want to know key plot details, please stop reading. For the rest of you nerds, here we go...
Hideo Kojima is notorious for his bizarre humor and deceptive marketing campaigns. Since Metal Gear Solid, Kojima has, for lack of a better term, fucked with his fan base. When Metal Gear Solid 2 was being advertised, every video depicted the series protagonist Solid Snake in every scene as the main character but when the game was released, you instead played as a new character Raiden. Then when Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater was being advertised, everyone thought you would be playing as Solid Snake in the jungle. But instead, it was slowly released through hints and mysterious messaging that you would in fact be playing as Big Boss in a prequel game.
With Metal Gear Solid 5 came the most bizarre marketing campaign to date. At first, the Phantom Pain trailer was released as a new game. There was a new (fake) video game company called Moby Dick Studios headed by a new (also fake) CEO Joakim Mogren. It was impossible to not notice the similarities in character and level design. The main character looked like Big Boss, a flaming image of Volgin showed up and there was an undeniable siting of Psycho Mantis as a young kid. There are literally hundreds more references that undeniably linked it to Metal Gear but I've omitted them so I can get to my point. Shortly thereafter it was announced through another trailer that Phantom Pain was in fact a MGS game and that there was actually two being released:Ground Zeroes and the Phantom Pain.
Now that Ground Zeroes has been released and a host of new trailers for The Phantom Pain has debuted, there has been a ground swell of theories about what is in store for this franchise in the next installment. If there is one thing that Kojima does best, it is that he gets us to delve so deep into his marketing and games, that it's hard to sort through what is real and what is not. But in the end, that is one of the many themes of the Metal Gear Solid series, which is a fascinating takeaway from the theories below.
