One artist is reimagining the first Metal Gear you’ve never played as an anime follow-up to The Phantom Pain

Official remakes can be hit or miss for me, but one thing I always love to see is a fan reimagining: It can be lower stakes and unbound from questions of approachability or profitability. Enter Mitchell Hammond, who’s been reinterpreting the primeval, 1987, MSX2 original Metal Gear game as an anime informed by later entries in the series⁠—all sans AI image generation.

Metal Gear Solid really blew the doors down, but it’s the 2D, 8-bit Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 for Japanese MSX computers where the series began. You can observe the beginnings of Hideo Kojima’s signature style, particularly in Metal Gear 2, and these are the games that actually show Snake’s battles with Big Boss⁠—as well as body double and MGS5 protagonist, Venom Snake⁠—that would reverberate for the rest of the series.