Game Room · T012 · Emma 👩🏻‍💻

METAL GEAR & METAL GEAR 2: Solid Snake Konami · Master Collection versions of the 1987 and 1990 MSX2 originals · Steam app 2131680

MG2 — primary lane MG1 — playing now, casually MG2 — not started Spoilers cleared by Rick

Where you are: playing Metal Gear (1987) — part one — casually, in your own time. Metal Gear 2 you have not started yet, and this page is built for that one, ahead of you, on purpose. Your words: “I want to have a good chunk of the HTML done before I start playing.”

Spoilers are open. You cleared them twice — the second time after being told plainly that the game you beat on PlayStation was Metal Gear Solid (1998), a different game, and that MG2 is very likely a first playthrough for you. So the bosses, the fates and the ending are all in here. Nothing is hidden; nothing will ambush you either.

Page age: calculating…

The page runs in three states, the same three the game does. Switch it and everything shifts — colour, the sweep, the pulse. It changes nothing factual; it changes the room you read it in.

drag to rotate

Instrument 01 / Perimeter Scope

The room is never still.

Your reference was a spinning armillary — rings, tick marks, one accent, permanent motion. This series already owns that object: it's a radar. Same grammar, native material. Riveted plate, stencil bearings, a sweep that leaves a tail, contacts that answer only when the beam finds them.

It is an ornament and it says so — no contact on it corresponds to anything in either game. The honesty is the point: a fake readout that looked real would be the worst thing on this page.

StateInfiltration
Sweep6.0 s
Bearing000°

Read this first

What this page is, and what it is not.

📖 It is researched now — you asked for that

This page originally held no game content at all, deliberately, because you were at zero. You reversed that yourself: “I want to have a good chunk of the HTML done before I start playing.” So both games are researched in full and the material is here ahead of you, on purpose.

🎨 What is here

Thirty images in one style — ten scenes and twenty character portraits — plus honest notes on where they work and where they don't. Both games' bosses, cast, kit, codec and routes. Art first and my read on it second; facts are the floor, not the point.

🔓 Spoilers are open, by your word

You cleared them twice — the second time after being told plainly that the PlayStation game you beat was Metal Gear Solid, a different game, and that part two is very likely a first playthrough for you. Endings, fates and betrayals are all in here. Nothing hidden, nothing ambushing you either.

🖼️ None of this is the real game

Every image below is original interpretation, drawn to your art brief. The actual games are MSX2 pixel art from 1987 and 1990 and look nothing like this. Labelled everywhere so it can never quietly teach you a false picture.

The art

Click any image for the full-resolution viewer — arrow keys step through the whole set. Commentary is what I think each picture is doing, not a description of what's in it; you can see what's in it.

Infiltrator at a compound wall at night
InterpretationStyle reference

The Approach

assets/generated/test-01-style-mg2.png

This is the image you approved, and it's the spec every other one was matched against. Worth looking at for what the frame argues rather than what it shows: two-thirds of it is unlit wall, and the only lit ground is the part he has to cross. The composition is saying that light is the danger — which is the entire proposition of a stealth game, stated before a single mechanic is explained.

Where it failsThe pose. He was meant to be pressed flat to the wall; he's stooped forward and slightly off-balance, one arm hanging. The architecture came out better than the man in it. Kept anyway, because it's the file every other image was calibrated to — swapping it now would cost the set its consistency.
Fortified compound at dusk
Interpretation

The Wall

assets/generated/mg2-02-fortress-approach.png

One long horizontal band of concrete cutting the frame in half, and exactly one warm thing in the entire picture — a lamp over the gate. Everything cold is where you are; the only warmth is inside the thing you're trying to get into.

The detail I'd point at: the foreground is broken slabs and rubble. Nobody built that. Something happened here already, and the picture doesn't say what — which is a more interesting way to open a game than a briefing would be.

Concrete service corridor
Interpretation

Inside

assets/generated/mg2-03-interior-corridor.png

The vanishing point falls into pure black. Not dim — black, no information at all. And the one light source is beside you, not ahead of you, so everything you can see is behind where you're going.

Emma's read [R]This is the half of the game the box art never sells. The painted key art promises a soldier against a war machine; the actual minute-to-minute is probably corridors like this one, where nothing is happening and that's precisely the tense part. If these games work on you, I'd bet it's this feeling rather than the spectacle.
Gloved hand holding a military radio handset
Interpretation

The Voice

assets/generated/mg2-04-radio.png

The only image in the set that's about a person and contains no person. It's also, deliberately, the brightest image here — the palette relaxes because this is the one moment in the picture-set where nobody is being hunted.

Note what the frame does with space: the handset and the glove are lit and solid, and the stairwell behind falls away cold and unresolved. The conversation is the only lit thing.

This one took two attemptsThe first drew a domestic telephone receiver and rendered it nearly black — wrong object, unusable lighting. Recorded rather than quietly replaced, because the fix is the useful part: an instruction that must not be ignored has to be pulled out and given explicit negatives, not phrased politely inside a sentence.
Infiltration equipment laid out flat
Interpretation

What You Carry

assets/generated/mg2-05-equipment.png

The most useful image on the page, and the plainest. Flat overhead, even light, everything separated — you can read it in a glance, which is the whole design constraint of a second monitor.

The thing I'd have you notice: laid out among a suppressed sidearm and rations, on equal footing and taking up more space than the weapon, there is a flattened cardboard box. The layout treats it as standard equipment. That single juxtaposition — lethal hardware and a cardboard box, presented without comment — says more about this series' sense of humour than a paragraph could.

Honest disclosureI put the box in that layout because it's series iconography, and I have not verified it appears in these two specific games. I haven't researched them, by design. If it turns out not to be in MG1 or MG2, this image is me being clever about the wrong decade — tell me and I'll cut it.
Red alert lamp over a floodlit yard
Interpretation

When It Goes Wrong

assets/generated/mg2-06-alert.png

There is no one in this picture. Two searchlights are sweeping an empty yard and a red lamp is screaming, and the subject of the image is the absence — you're not in frame because you're already hiding, and the alarm doesn't need you present to have won.

Worth noting across the whole set: red appears here and nowhere else. Nine other images and the palette never spends it. That's why this one reads as loud even though it's the same restrained colour scheme as the rest.

Bipedal machine in silhouette inside a hangar
Interpretation

The Thing In The Hangar

assets/generated/mg2-07-walker-silhouette.png

Deliberately unreadable. You can find two legs and a hull and then the detail refuses to arrive — and the little gantries and railings at its feet are doing all the work, because they're the only thing in frame whose size you already know.

Emma's read [R]Restraint beats rendering here. A fully detailed machine would be a picture of a machine; this is a picture of not being able to see it properly, which is closer to what the thing is supposed to feel like before you meet it.
Two honest notes — updated 2026-08-08This was drawn under a rule that has since been retired: the old prompt forbade resembling any existing design, so this machine deliberately resembles nothing. That rule was wrong for character and machine art and it has been fixed — see the proper Metal Gear D and TX-55 portraits, which are drawn as themselves. The original line here said “I don't know what the real machine looks like, because I haven't looked.” That is no longer true — both games are researched now, at your instruction. Second note still stands: this one drifts toward generic sci-fi mech rather than industrial brutalism. It survives as a mood piece, not as a reference.
Figure rappelling down a wall in rain
Interpretation

Down

assets/generated/mg2-08-night-descent.png

The only image with genuine motion in it, and it's here for that reason — everything else in the set is held breath, and a page of nothing but stillness stops reading as tense and starts reading as static.

The camera is above and behind him, so you're looking down the drop with him rather than watching him from safety. It's the one frame on this page that puts you in the position instead of observing it.

Dossiers — all eleven bosses

Every boss encounter in the game, in the order you'll meet them. Researched by Soliton 🛰️, audited by me against sources outside her ledger, and anchored to the 1990 game rather than to the later entries that constantly retell it. Tactics are folded away behind a toggle on every card — the fight is there when you want it and not before. Second tab has the nine people Snake actually talks to — the ones on the other end of the Codec.

⚠️ All 20 portraits are GENERATED ILLUSTRATIONS, not official art — commissioned 2026-08-08, drawn from each character's written description. The real MG1/MG2 are MSX2 pixel art and look nothing like this; every one is labelled so it can never be mistaken for Konami's. Gray Fox is deliberately drawn as the human soldier he is in THIS game, not the cyborg he becomes later. Stats are my estimates, marked as such wherever they appear. Everything factual is Soliton-researched and audited by me against sources outside her ledger.

Kit, codec and route

The three questions you actually ask me mid-game — what is this thing and do I need it · who do I call · where the hell am I going. Built from Soliton's 🛰️ research packet. Every item is listed by the problem it solves, because "what is it for" is the useful answer and "what is it" is not. All of it is Metal Gear 2; part one is a different map and a much smaller kit.

⚪ MINUTE — worth knowing, costs you nothing 🟠 MINOR — will cost you time, ammo or a retry 🔴 CRITICAL — can break or end a run
🔴 Critical · knowledge wall

You cannot kill Big Boss with a weapon

The final fight strips you completely — you arrive with nothing, in his building, while he hunts you. The only thing that kills him is a lighter and a spray can, combined into an improvised flamethrower, and both are lying inside the arena. Master Miller tells you if you call him on 140.38. If you never learn that number, the game expects you to work it out alone in a room with a man who is actively killing you.

🟠 Minor · looks like a bug, isn't

Campbell stops answering on 140.85 — he moved

His sequence is 140.85 → 140.66 → 140.24. If you keep dialling the first one in a later section and get nothing, the Codec is not broken. 🎩 In the original release he tells you the new number is printed in the game's software manual — the physical booklet in the box. Which became genuinely awkward in later re-releases, where players had no manual and simply lost contact with their commanding officer.

🟠 Minor · one-way moment

After Metal Gear D you throw everything away

Gray Fox sets your equipment on fire on his way out, and putting it out means discarding every item you are carrying — rations last. Then you fight him bare-handed in a room ringed with mines. It is scripted, not a mistake, but it is a shock if you don't see it coming.

Source: Soliton 🛰️ evidence packet 2026-08-07-1237-emma-mg2-roster, filed in this game's Notes/. It is marked UNVERIFIED CLAIMS and I have not re-tested it in your build. ✅ The two frequency conflicts it flagged are now CLOSED by Rick (2026-08-08): Marv is 140.51, and Campbell runs the full 140.85 → 140.66 → 140.24 sequence — source, Ten Ten Productions' cross-game frequency list. Acquisition points are still from walkthrough convergence, not a Konami document: treat those as reliable, not gospel.

Part One — Metal Gear, 1987

The game you are actually playing. Outer Heaven, three buildings, and a walking tank that was never finished. Kept lighter than part two on purpose — but the item table and the warning below are the parts that earn their place, because MG1 is a game about carrying the exact right object to the exact right obstruction.

⚪ MINUTE — worth knowing, costs you nothing 🟠 MINOR — will cost you time, ammo or a retry 🔴 CRITICAL — can break or end a run
🔴 Critical · can end a run

Do not kill prisoners

Rescuing them raises your CLASS rank. Killing one lowers it — and rank is an invisible gate that nothing on screen ever explains:

Below four stars, Jennifer will not answer you → Jennifer is how you get the rocket launcher → the rocket launcher is the only normal answer to Bloody Brad → Bloody Brad drops Card 7 → Card 7 is the route to Building 3.

The current MSX walkthrough warns outright that killing prisoners can leave you unable to finish the game. You would not find out for hours. Dirty Duck is where this bites — he hides behind three of them.

🟠 Minor · costs you alerts

Throw away the transmitter

After the deliberate capture, an enemy TRANSMITTER is quietly added to your inventory along with your recovered gear. It keeps guards alerted and gives away your position. Select it and discard it. Most players never notice it is there — it does not announce itself and it looks like just another item.

🟠 Minor · resource economy

Rank also sets how much you can carry

Which is what lets you haul enough mines for the Tank and enough plastic explosives for TX-55. Rescuing prisoners is not completionism in this game. It is the economy. Rations scale with it too.

⚪ Minute · nice to know

The cardboard box is real, and older than you'd think

It is genuinely in the 1987 game — Building 1, 3F, the Card 2 room. Hides you from ordinary guards and cameras while you stay still; move and you're exposed, and a guard can still walk into you. ⚠️ Whether it's needed for truck transport is disputed between sources and deliberately left unresolved — no source could close it, so I'm not pretending otherwise.

Source: Soliton 🛰️ packet 2026-08-08-1812-emma-mg1-roster, in this game's Notes/. Filed UNVERIFIED CLAIMS; not re-tested in your build. ⚠️ Names differ between translations — the old MSX English called them Shoot Gunner, Arnold, Coward Duck, Bull Tank; your build says Shotmaker, Bloody Brad, Dirty Duck, Bulldozer. Same fights, different words. 🔴 And beware anything you read online about "Metal Gear 1": most of it describes the NES version, which is a different game — different opening, extra buildings, Hind D replaced entirely, and no TX-55 at all (a supercomputer instead). Everything here is the MSX2 game, which is the one you own.

What “Metal Gear” actually is

The thing the series is named after, and the thing you will spend the whole game hearing about before you ever fight one. Two of them exist across these two games, both designed by the same man.

Metal Gear D, a bipedal walking battle tank, in an underground hangar
⚠️ Generated illustration, not official art. The real game is MSX2 pixel art and looks nothing like this. Note the legs — thin plating and exposed hydraulics against a heavily armoured hull. That is not decoration; it is the fight.

The idea

A nuclear launch platform that walks

Nuclear weapons in 1990 were fixed things — silos you could photograph from orbit, submarines you could track, bombers you could see coming. Metal Gear's entire purpose is to make a nuclear launch mobile, hidden and deniable. A bipedal tank crosses ground no wheeled launcher can, hides in terrain, and fires from anywhere on earth.

That is why a small unrecognised state wants one so badly. It does not make them strong. It makes them impossible to ignore — and for Zanzibar Land, being impossible to ignore is the strategy.

Metal Gear · 1987 · part one

TX-55

The original, built at Outer Heaven. Same designer — Drago Pettrovich Madnar, who you meet in part two pretending to be a fellow prisoner. Destroying it is what part one is about, and it is why Snake has the reputation he spends part two trying to live down.

Outer HeavenDesigner: MadnarDestroyed by Snake

Metal Gear 2 · 1990 · part two

Metal Gear D

The improved model, built at Zanzibar Land by the same man, piloted by Gray Fox — which is the point. You do not fight a machine; you fight the man who trained beside you, sitting inside it. It carries a 360° Vulcan cannon and paired homing missiles, and it will crush you outright if you touch its feet.

Its weakness is given to you by its own designer, dying, after he has already betrayed you: the legs are thinly armoured. Grenades, into the legs, while its missiles commit to a line you are no longer standing in.

Zanzibar LandPilot: Gray FoxWeak point: legsBoss 9

The other prize

OILIX — the reason any of this is happening

Dr. Kio Marv, a Czech biologist, discovered a process for refining a petroleum-grade fuel from biomass. Not a weapon — an energy supply. A state that holds OILIX stops depending on anyone for oil, and the world's entire energy order gets a hole punched in it.

Zanzibar Land kidnapped Marv to take it. He hid the microfilm inside a Konami MSX game cartridge, which is either a joke or the most 1990 thing in the game. He never gives it up, and Madnar kills him for refusing.

My read

The machine is in the title and it is barely in the game. You see it twice: once across a bridge while it kills someone, and once when you destroy it. Everything else is people talking about wanting one.

That is deliberate, and it is why the story holds up. Metal Gear isn't the threat — it's what people are willing to do to get one. A scientist is kidnapped and strangled, a woman is betrayed and shot off a bridge, a soldier sells out everyone who trusted him. The tank is almost a formality by the time you reach it. [R] — my reading, not a sourced claim.

FOXHOUND, Outer Heaven, and everyone else

Who all these organisations are and why they care. You do not need to know any of this to play — but almost every character's motive is really their affiliation, and the names come at you fast.

Yours

FOXHOUND

The special forces unit Snake belonged to and left. Big Boss commanded it — the man you are walking toward — and Roy Campbell rebuilt it after him, which means your commander's whole job has been cleaning up after your final boss. Gray Fox held its highest codename, “FOX.”

Three of this game's most important people are FOXHOUND: the man who sends you, the man who betrays you, and the man who made you. That is not a coincidence, it is the premise.

Campbell · commanderMiller · instructorGray Fox · FOX rankBig Boss · former CO

Destroyed · part one

Outer Heaven

Big Boss's first attempt at a nation for soldiers, and the setting of the 1987 game you are playing right now. Snake brought it down. What happened afterwards is the grievance that drives part two: the bombing that followed killed resistance fighters and children — people who had been on Snake's side.

Kyle Schneider led that resistance. In part two he is Black Ninja, your first boss, working for the man he once fought, because that man pulled the survivors out.

Theirs · part two

Zanzibar Land

Big Boss's second attempt, and a more coherent one — a fortified state built from war orphans, discarded veterans and mercenaries nobody else wanted. It stole nuclear weapons, kidnapped Marv, and built Metal Gear D.

The uncomfortable part is that it is not simply a villain's fortress. It genuinely rescues people the world threw away. Big Boss's argument is that he is the only one who gave them somewhere to go — and then he raises their children to be the next generation of soldiers.

Watching

The CIA and the StB

Holly White is CIA, undercover as a freelance journalist, in Zanzibar Land a month before you got there. Snake himself worked deep cover for the Agency after Outer Heaven, and rejected it — which is part of why he was in Canada when Campbell called.

Gustava Heffner is StB — Czechoslovak state security — assigned as Marv's bodyguard and interpreter. She was a champion figure skater first. She tried to defect to be with Gray Fox, the West refused her, and that ended both her career and the relationship.

For hire

The mercenary economy

Not an organisation — a market, and most of the cast lives in it. George Kasler brokers military information and once fought in the Zanzibar war himself. Master Miller trains soldiers at a mercenary school. Every boss you fight was bought.

My read

Every faction in this game is a former something. FOXHOUND rebuilt out of Big Boss's, Zanzibar built out of Outer Heaven's survivors, a resistance leader now serving the man he fought, a state security officer with no state worth serving, a spy who quit the Agency and went to Canada.

Nobody in it is fighting a war. They are all dealing with the aftermath of one, and the only person offering them anything is the man you have been sent to kill. For a 1990 game about a walking tank, that is a considerably better story than it needed to be. [R] — my reading.

The shape they make

Every named character, and what they actually are to each other. Hover or tap any node to isolate their connections. This is the one view a wiki can't give you — a wiki lists people; this shows the shape.

Relationship map

Solid Snake

Player character · the centre everything is measured against

Solid lines are relationships. Dashed lines are a death — one person responsible for another's. There are four. Two are people Snake was trying to protect and failed. The other two he kills himself — and they're the two he was closest to.

F/01 — StatementT012 · Perimeter

The compound is
never asleep.

01 — Light

Every lit surface in this art set is somewhere you cannot stand. Illumination is the enemy's, not yours.

02 — Sound

Nothing on this page depicts a fight. The whole set is composed around the moment before one, which is where the tension actually lives.

03 — Time

The alarm has no expiry in these pictures. It is the only element allowed to be loud, and it appears exactly once.

04 — You

In eight of ten images there is no person at all. The place is the subject. You are the thing it has not noticed yet.

Two predictions you can settle yourself

Marked [R] — reasoned, not known. Both are falsifiable within an hour of play, which is the only kind of opinion worth putting in writing. When one is wrong, it gets recorded as wrong.

🔮 The art gap will be large — and in the game's favour

Everything on this page is high-resolution illustration. The real thing is MSX2 pixel art at a fraction of the resolution. My guess: within an hour the pixel art will read as more atmospheric than you expect, not less — low resolution forces suggestion, and suggestion is exactly what this page has been trying to manufacture on purpose. Record which way it actually went.

🔮 The game will assume a manual

1987 and 1990 designs were shipped with printed documentation and built assuming you had it. Prediction: you will hit at least one point where the game expects knowledge it never puts on screen — a control, a mechanic, or a requirement stated only in a box you don't have. When it happens, tell me and it goes in the folder — that's the kind of thing this page should carry and a wiki won't frame for you.

Facts — the floor, not the point

Everything verified at source on 2026-08-05. Basis marked on every row. You can get all of this off a store page in five seconds, which is exactly why it's short and at the bottom.

FactBasisVerified
Steam app 2131680, METAL GEAR & METAL GEAR 2: Solid Snake[K]2026-08-05
Released on PC 2023-10-24; developer and publisher KONAMI[K]2026-08-05
Contains two games — Metal Gear (1987) and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990), both originally MSX2[K]2026-08-05
Listed at $19.99 · 12 Steam achievements · single-player · Family Sharing[K]2026-08-05
Store page states a controller is required, keyboard as alternative[K]2026-08-05
MG1/MG2 runs its own patch track, separate from the collection's. Newest is Ver. 2.0.2, dated 2026-02-13, listed as minor fixes and adjustments only — no roster or story changes[K]2026-08-08
The old “Ver. 3.0.0, unknown whether it touched MG1/MG2” line is retired. It was a different app's number. “Master Collection Vol. 1” is a bundle, not a game — it installs as four separate Steam entries, each versioned on its own: MG&MG2 (2131680), MGS (2131630), MGS2 (2131640), MGS3. That is the whole source of the confusion[K]2026-08-08
Version figure is Konami's own update notice, reached through Soliton's 🛰️ evidence packet. Emma's own attempt to re-verify it directly against Steam's announcement feed failed to load — sourced, not personally confirmed[R]2026-08-08
Which version your install is on — not established. Your screenshot showed the collection's news feed mid-scroll, not your build[R]2026-08-05

What this page does not know

Named out loud, because a gap you can see is worth more than a plausible number in a confident-looking box.

✅ Closed since this list was first written: which game you're in (part one, casually — part two not started) · your spoiler position (open, your word, twice) · standalone vs Master Collection (it doesn't matter — MG1/MG2 is Steam app 2131680 either way) · the two disputed Codec frequencies (Marv 140.51; Campbell 140.85 → 140.66 → 140.24) · and MG2's roster, bosses, tactics, kit and route, which are now researched in full.

Art index

The ten scene pieces, click straight into the viewer. The twenty character portraits live on their cards under Dossiers and People. All thirty are generated illustrations, not official art.