Contrary to popular belief, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was never going to be a PlayStation 3 exclusive.

Of the many games in the Metal Gear Solid series, Metal Gear Solid 4 is an intriguing title. Apart from being playable via PlayStation Now, it was never released outside of PlayStation 3. Fans of the series have long believed that the game was initially intended to be a PlayStation exclusive, but new information suggests that this was not the case.

The majority of the gaming community considers Metal Gear Solid to be Sony-exclusive, given its consistent presence on Sony platforms, but many games in the series have found their way onto other platforms. Metal Gear Solid 2, for example, received a cross-platform release on both PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox when it was released in the early 2000s.

In the case of Metal Gear Solid 4, its exclusivity to PlayStation 3 is much more circumstantial.

Ryan Payton, formerly of Kojima Productions, revealed in an interview with ResetEra that Metal Gear Solid 4 was never a Sony-exclusive title. Payton later explained that Hideo Kojima, the creator of the Metal Gear Solid series, would have been happy to approve a game port to Xbox 360, but Kojima made a conscious decision not to do so.

Recently, an appearance on a 2013 radio show surfaced where Kojima explained that porting Metal Gear Solid 4 to Xbox 360 was nearly impossible due to the hardware limitations of the Xbox 360. The PS3 was the first console to use Blu-ray discs, which could store vast amounts of game data, as opposed to the Xbox 360, which still used DVDs.

Therefore, the lack of cross-platform support for Metal Gear Solid 4 is ultimately due to the technological differences between the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Incredibly, the public perception of the program’s exclusivity was unintentionally skewed, but in today’s world, it’s understandable why. Nowadays, it is PlayStation exclusives such as Uncharted 4, Persona 5 and Ghost of Tsushima that set PlayStation apart from other publishers.

In any case, it will be interesting to see if Metal Gear Solid 4’s presence on PS3 remains stalled. It’s hard to say what, if anything, Konami has in store for the Metal Gear Solid series. In recent times Konami has done very little with the strongest franchises like Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill or Castlevania. So it is unlikely that the game will move from the platform it is currently on.

Source: EuroGamer