Solid Snake is an elite espionage operative that’s called in for the most impossible of missions. The fate of the world hangs in the balance on almost every assignment, and often his games end with Snake barely preventing terrorists from using advanced weaponry to change the landscape of war and world politics as we know it. In fact, these suicide missions sometimes have such a thin margin of success that it’s incredibly easy to imagine a world where Snake fails to save the day by a matter of seconds.

Using an imagination machine powered by pure guesswork, we travel to a dimension where Snake’s mission at Shadow Moses in the original Metal Gear Solid went critically wrong at the most critical of moments. The complex world of Metal Gear has so many moving parts that by just changing one moment, well...

Things seemed almost over at the Shadow Moses facility. Liquid Snake had activated Metal Gear Rex in the hopes of using the mech’s nuclear capabilities, but Snake was this close to stopping it with the help of Cyborg Ninja/Gray Fox. Then, thanks to Liquid’s last-second maneuvering, Gray misses the final shot that would’ve exposed Rex’s cockpit. Still protected, Liquid crushes Fox and fires his weapon. Snake can only watch as the nuclear payload flies towards Liquid’s target, an uninhabited nuclear test site in China. Snake eventually shuts down the Metal Gear using multiple stinger missiles, but the damage has been done.

In the aftermath, Snake (with a little help from FOXDIE) kills Liquid outside of the Shadow Moses base. Then he hastily escapes the island with Meryl and Otacon before the US government nukes the entire complex. Meanwhile, Revolver Ocelot runs off too, giving President George Sears (aka Solidus Snake) the Metal Gear design information Ocelot secured, but the response coming from China is souring what should be a celebratory secret transmission.

The world has been thrown into a whole new conflict after the twin nuclear explosions in China and Shadow Moses. Just as Liquid and Big Boss had dreamed, soldiers are a hot commodity in this newly embattled world. China definitely holds a grudge after learning it was an American-made weapon that terrorists had shot at the country, and other nations are building up armaments as tensions rise. Private military companies (PMCs) are more in demand than ever as every developed country is preparing for the likelihood of a massive war. President Sears couldn’t be happier.

Taking the world to the brink of war wasn’t originally part of Solidus’ master plan, but he makes it work to his advantage. Sears even starts up a secret Metal Gear production site with the intention of selling them to multiple PMCs over the next few years. The Patriots group, the secret organization Solidus once answered to, is annoyed that this societal instability is getting in the way of its plot to control the world, but Solidus is too insulated as a wartime leader to be removed from office. And despite how odd his new mech suit looks, the American public is firmly behind him. However, the collective isn’t totally harmless, as it covertly provide intel to a group of operatives that’s currently in hiding.

Post-Shadow Moses, Snake, Meryl, and Otacon disappear from the public eye. Going into hiding was necessary because not only had their last mission ended in a less than stellar fashion, but also they'd seen their friends Mei Ling, Roy Campbell, and Nastasha Romanenko all arrested for treason by order of the President of the United States. This whole situation felt very wrong, and as Snake and company began their search for answers, more and more signs pointed to some incredibly convoluted plans that lead back to the White House.

Of course, that was merely just the portion of the truth that the Patriots wanted the hidden operatives to see. After 15 minutes of Codec crosstalk, Snake and the gang learned of the new Metal Gears Solidus had secretly authorized, that was enough to spur the team into action. On top of that intel, Snake also found out Solidus was the remaining Big Boss clone from the infamous Les Enfant Terribles experiment. That experiment, of course, also created Solid and Liquid. As Snake and company spent the last half of the year in lengthy cutscenes, preparing to stop Solidus as World War III creeps ever closer.

Backed up remotely by Otacon, Snake and Meryl break into the Metal Gear facility, a building hidden on a secret base called Big Shell. Unfortunately for them, Solidus was prepared for this eventuality and stocked the facility with his specially trained group of mercenaries, Dead Cell. The team included the seemingly unkillable Vamp and the incredibly lucky Fortune, but Solidus’ ace in the hole didn’t even realize he was working for the bad guys. Raiden, a former child soldier Solidus had secretly been training, is sent on what he believes to be a virtuous mission: stopping Solid Snake, a former agent gone rogue, from stealing a Metal Gear.

After Raiden finally meets Snake and fights him to a standstill, the angsty young man realized that Snake wasn’t his enemy (after a 30 minute cutscene). Over the next 2 hours of Codec conversations, Raiden whines about the false nature of his existence, as well as his troubled relationship with his girlfriend Rose, all while Snake watches with increasing irritation. Once Raiden had cried himself out, he teams up with Snake to defeat Dead Cell and destroy the Metal Gear production line--though Snake was in charge the whole time, as he logically should've been. Unfortunately, before the good guys could finally take on Solidus, the President is shot and killed by a traitorous Revolver Ocelot, who’d been acting pretty weird since he got his new hand transplant from Liquid Snake’s corpse.

Though Snake and company had a brief moment of celebration after stopping Solidus and saving the world from a Metal Gear-filled war, they soon learned they were just pawns in the Patriots’ game. Thanks to new secrets revealed by a sobbing Raiden, Snake pieced together that the Patriots had been behind everything--everything--and that fact was driven home all the more when they saw the new man the Patriots installed as the President of the United States: Revolver Ocelot.

Many couldn’t believe that this dark horse candidate, now going by the name Liquid Ocelot, could find his way into the Oval Office, but the Patriots machinations made it all too simple. Perhaps it was thanks to nano machines changing votes in the ballot boxes, though the press credited Ocelot’s popularity to his revolver-twirling skills captivating the nation. In fact, Ocelot’s only response during debates was to expertly spin his guns in his hands, which was met with huge applause every time. Yet Snake saw saw through the twirls and flash, and quickly started forming a plan to take down Ocelot. Of course, Snake’s team was worried about the clear signs of advanced aging that their daring leader was exhibiting.

Pres. Ocelot’s secret plan to build a new Outer Heaven was advancing smoothly. Once set up as POTUS, Ocelot killed all the meddlesome Patriot leaders and now was following his own plans for world domination. Outer Heaven, now located secretly within the Empire State Building, would serve as his new home base once global war broke out, and it would be a place where soldiers could live in-between assignments. Snake and his team wanted to combat this new conspiracy, but their current, field leader, Raiden, was too busy elsewhere.

Raiden was trapped in a yearlong loop playing VR missions. These had been used by Solidus in Raiden’s training, but now Raiden used these simulations as a cognitive reassignment exercise to see his past in a new light. Most people agreed that, while the VR missions might be fun, they weren’t a replacement for a new Metal Gear Solid mission, but Raiden just kept going. Once he finally pulled himself out around December 17, Raiden had a long monologue about the nature of reality versus perception, a speech that was only met with silence and incredulous eye rolls.

While Snake’s team dealt with his rapid aging and Raiden’s navel gazing, Pres. Ocelot’s plans continued without any problems. While Ocelot was a surprisingly progressive leader--he legalized both marijuana and gay marriage, all while frantically twirling his pistols--he was still orchestrating what could eventually become a massive war. And Ocelot would control all the participating soldiers from his home base in the recently constructed Outer Heaven. The only thing he didn’t count on? IBS.

While building Outer Heaven, Ocelot recruited many of his old team members, and that included the fairly unlucky Johnny Sasaki. Known for intestinal problems cropping up at the most inappropriate moments, Sasaki’s most recent case of Irritable bowel syndrome was so extreme that the stink disgusted wave after wave of troops. Soon they all stopped believing in the cause and evacuated the incomplete Outer Heaven in search of a less smelly mercenary paradise. Without his private army, Liquid Ocelot’s plans were ruined. Now what was he going to do with 100 unfinished Metal Gear units?

Thanks to Sasaki, Snake’s team was in the perfect position to stop Ocelot, but now their leader was nowhere to be found. Some thought Snake had gone undercover using the name Iroquois Pliskin. Others thought that FOXDIE had finally taken effect and he’d collapsed in the middle of nowhere, his body waiting to be found. One particularly weird group though he’d run off to fight cosplayers dressed up as Nintendo mascots in a smashing brawl. They were all wrong. Snake spent the year stuck inside a cardboard box.

At first, Snake did it because he wanted to sneak off in the night to face Ocelot on his own. But thanks to his advancing age, Snake fell asleep in the box before leaving the hideout. When he awoke he had forgotten where he was, and was left loudly guessing his whereabouts while also contemplating the changing nature of war. Thinking it was all over, Snake considered suicide before rejecting it at the last minute, choosing instead to enjoy his new life inside a box for as long as it lasted. Eventually Meryl finds the box inside a local warehouse, freeing Snake so they can restart their long delayed mission.

For several years the Metal Gear fighting team had been planning another mission with Raiden leading his own team, but no matter how much they tried, they couldn’t make it work. It seemed that Raiden was just too emotionally unstable to lead his own mission, so the team gave up and started planning the next mission for the newly rediscovered Snake. But then a new team of planners came in to help Raiden reconfigure his upcoming mission.

The new team strengthened Raiden with platinum, a metal that never really caught on with the mainstream, but gained a dedicated fan base in the PMC community. Raiden’s resulting adventure with platinum contained surprisingly fewconspiracies, and it was quite brief, but he performed wonderfully. Raiden reached a whole new audience, and thanks to platinum, the main Metal Gear team was free to plan its next game--er, we mean mission. Its next mission.

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Didn’t expect that, did you? Yes, while waiting for Snake’s long-awaited next mission and final showdown with Liquid Ocelot, Snake instead spends the next 365 days thinking about what it was like to be in a PMC in the early 1970s. Would he have different tech and guns? Would he meet famous people and future enemies as their younger selves? Would he find clues to future conspiracies?

The potential of 1974 seemed limitless. Why have new adventures when Snake could just live in the past forever, listening to James Bond-style songs and sneaking up on soldiers in Costa Rica? Things were so much simpler back in that time period. You know what? Snake should never deal with the confusing future and all its massive conspiracies. He should just hang out here in the ‘70s, maybe even the early ‘80s so he can see Empire Strikes Back on opening night. Perhaps he’ll be ready to resume the present day storyline on the PlayStation 5.

So that’s how we see an entire other dimension of Metal Gear playing out, but what about you? Share your predictions and conjurings in the comments!

And if you're looking for more weirdness? Check out the craziest Metal Gear moments and what would happen if Duke Nukem failed.