Hideo Kojima marketed a sequel starring Solid Snake, then swapped him out for an unknown rookie after the prologue — a deliberate betrayal of the player that made MGS2 the first genuinely postmodern video game.
Follows: Metal Gear Solid
The Raiden reveal was engineered with unusual discipline. Kojima kept the character out of every trailer and trade-show demo, showing only the Tanker chapter starring Snake, so that no player would suspect the switch until they had already paid and pressed start. When the game moves to the Big Shell and hands over control of an unfamiliar rookie, the player's disappointment is not a side effect but the intended experience. Raiden is a fan of Snake's legend, trained only in simulations, being shaped into a copy of a hero he has never met — a mirror of the player holding the controller, and the mechanism by which Kojima interrogates the worship of his own protagonist.
Kojima said outright that constructing a postmodern plot was a principal goal, and the finale delivers. The Patriots — an AI network governing society — reveal that the entire mission was the S3 Plan, "Selection for Societal Sanity," an artificial scenario built to replicate the first game and manufacture a new Snake. The AI then breaks the fourth wall to address the player about information overload, memetic inheritance, and the deliberate curation of context and truth. Furious and confusing in 2001, the sequence now reads as startlingly prescient about algorithmic reality, and it secured MGS2's reputation as the game that turned the medium's own conventions into its subject matter.