Hideo Kojima had a vision that unfortunately never came to fruition at Konami, and now that he’s no longer working there, the Metal Gear franchise will likely never take such a historic turn.

Big Boss was the protagonist of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (he’s Snake too, but not the one we got to control in the first, second, fourth installments of Metal Gear Solid…), and Kojima wanted his story to have a chance to unfold in a new game. DidYouKnowGaming put the pieces of the puzzle together in a video at the end of March, and the result is surprising: Boss could have been a major player in the Normandy landings, meaning that a Metal Gear episode could have been set in World War II. Kojima would have been working on it after Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

In a 2011 video about Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (see second embedded video), Kojima said the following: “We finished Metal Gear Solid 4 in 2008, and the development team took a break right after that. But of course, we were in a situation where I had to start planning Metal Gear Solid V. So I started brainstorming different ideas. I had several ideas for a game featuring the Boss and the Cobra unit during the Normandy invasion. So I handed those plans over to the team to take charge and develop the game. I presented my ideas to the team in the summer of 2008. However, simply handing Metal Gear Solid V over to the younger members of the team was a bit much, and there was resistance to doing it without my involvement. I was working on a new project at the time.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance was a parallel story that he wasn’t directly involved with. However, the Normandy story doesn’t end there: he later said that he had previously had an idea for a story that would have featured Big Boss, but it wouldn’t have been a spin-off, it would have been an element of the main series…

Source: Metal Gear Informer