Metal Gear Solid 4: Sons of the Patriots was released fifteen years ago; that’s how far technology has come in two generations of consoles!

Hideo Kojima may have worked on Snatcher or Polycenauts, but most people know the Japanese genius for Metal Gear. His games foreshadowed several things: specific problems of the information age (Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty), Guantanamo Bay (Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes), and the unbreakable cycles of international conflict (Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain). Although Kojima imagined the themes as science fiction, what his games talked about often came to pass in a rather frightening way.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is still, quite inexplicably, PlayStation 3-exclusive to this day (one of Konami’s most incomprehensible moves…), and in it, you controlled an older Solid Snake in 2014. You’ll find yourself in a civil war between private military companies (PMCs): “Metal Gear Solid 4 depicts the next generation of proxy wars and war economies waged by unmanned weapons and PMCs—a future where parties do not fight but are represented by drones, proxy soldiers, and corporations. In the future, those who sell or rent weapons will introduce SOPs to take full control of the battlefield. The ‘arms laundering’ concept will also emerge, allowing the parties to escape from the SOPs. Also, by suppressing SOPs, the battlefield can be controlled. Metal Gear Solid 2 was a wake-up call to the digital society, but MGS4 is about the digitalization of the battlefield. Drones, SOPs, personal identification of weapons, weapon laundering, etc. From ‘humint’ to ‘sigint’ to ‘osint’. It is no longer science fiction.,” wrote Kojima.

We need to explain a few terms. SOP does not stand for Standard Operating Procedure (a military term) but for the Sons of the Patriots control system that regulates, assists, and effectively controls PMC soldiers. Snake in Metal Gear Solid 4 cannot use the weapons of the defeated soldiers due to their encoding, but Drebin, the arms dealer, can replace the identification chips to use the weapons. Humint stands for Human intelligence or knowledge. Sigint is short for Signals intelligence (for example, intercepting radio communication). And Osint is short for open-source intelligence: obtaining information from sources available to anyone.

Scary, but he’s right.

Source: PCGamer