Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty · PlayStation 2 · 2001 · Metafictional Collapse · Spoilers
Kojima spends a game convincing you that you are playing a Metal Gear sequel, then has the commanding officer who has been guiding you reveal that he is a piece of software, and that the entire mission was a simulation designed to test whether it could manipulate you.
Metal Gear Solid 2 opens as the sequel everyone expected — Solid Snake, a tanker, a familiar structure — and then, without warning, takes Snake away and hands the player Raiden: a blonde, inexperienced rookie who has never seen combat, whose training consisted entirely of VR simulations of Solid Snake's previous missions. The audience's outrage at this substitution was immediate, considerable, and precisely the point. The ending pays it off. Atop Federal Hall in Manhattan, the Colonel — Raiden's commanding officer, who has been issuing orders over the Codec for the entire game — reveals that he does not exist. He is an AI, a composite of the GW artificial intelligence and Raiden's own perception of Colonel Campbell, reaching into Raiden's brain through nanomachines every time the Codec was used, generating memories and scenarios from Raiden's real experiences. Raiden's girlfriend Rose is likewise part of the apparatus. And the S3 Plan, which Raiden has spent the game believing stands for "Solid Snake Simulation", is in fact "Selection for Societal Sanity": a system designed to control the flow of cultural information and human thought itself, on the grounds that in a digital era, trivial information drowns knowledge and truth. The entire Big Shell incident — every event of the game — was a stress test of whether the system could successfully manipulate a person under extreme conditions. Raiden was the subject. So, the game strongly implies, was the player.
The reason the ending lands rather than merely confusing is that its structure has been enacted on the player, not just described to them. Raiden trained for this mission by playing simulations of Solid Snake's previous missions — which is to say, by playing Metal Gear Solid. The player did exactly the same thing. Raiden spends the game receiving instructions through a communications channel from an authority he trusts and cannot see. So does the player, and it is the same channel.
When the Colonel dissolves — glitching, quoting nonsense, telling Raiden to turn off the game console — the fourth wall does not so much break as become visible for the first time as having been the wall all along. The AI's closing argument, that a digital culture drowning in trivial information requires something to curate what is passed on, is delivered to an audience that has spent twenty hours obediently following instructions from a voice in a box. Kojima is not making a point about Raiden.
In 2001 this was received badly. Players had been promised Solid Snake and were given a substitute; the plot was widely dismissed as incoherent, self-indulgent, or simply broken; the ending was a punchline. The bait-and-switch was so total that Konami had actively concealed Raiden from all pre-release marketing, which many took as evidence of bad faith rather than as the setup it was.
The reassessment took roughly a decade and arrived from an unexpected direction: the world caught up. The AI's monologue about the unchecked proliferation of context-free information, about a culture unable to distinguish what is true from what is merely repeated, and about the need for someone to decide what gets passed on, reads very differently after social media than it did in 2001. Metal Gear Solid 2 is now routinely described as one of the most prescient works the medium has produced, which is a considerable turnaround for an ending whose original reception was that it made no sense.