Two players. One 1998 PlayStation game that was never built to do this. That’s the pitch, and there’s already footage to back it up.
YouTuber Felipe is building a co-op mod for the original Metal Gear Solid, and the trailer he dropped on his channel makes it look a lot further along than a fan project has any business being.
There’s no release date for the full thing yet. What there is: a description that spells out exactly how far he plans to take this.
The creator isn’t hedging about what this is
“A WORLD FIRST. For the first time, Metal Gear Solid (1998) is being played online by two players simultaneously. This is the first attempt to bring the original PlayStation classic into a true online multiplayer experience something the original game was never designed to support. No remake. No reimagined version. Just the original Metal Gear Solid, reverse-engineered and brought online. One game. Two players. One world. This is only the beginning. Metal Gear Solid Coop.”
No remake. No reimagining. The 1998 game, pulled apart and put back online. Emulation is what makes it possible.
The camera is the problem waiting to happen
Here’s the technical snag worth watching. The original runs on a top-down, overhead camera, which gets awkward fast if two players wander away from each other. That’s the hurdle.
Everything else already looks pretty great in the footage. The hope is that by launch it sits as naturally alongside the rest of the game as anything Konami shipped in it.
Why the first Solid still earns this kind of attention
The original Metal Gear Solid deserves its spot among the best games of the PlayStation 1 era. It took the series into 3D for the first time and showed what the whole thing could become.
Plenty of entries followed. Each one bent the formula in its own direction and each one turned out great on its own terms.
But the first Solid game (or the third Metal Gear, depending on how you count) has something the others don’t. Go back to it now and it holds up, as long as you’re willing to shrug off a few archaic habits it never grew out of.
Konami owns the name. That’s the part fans keep chewing on
Hideo Kojima is off the Konami train, and the franchise’s future is murkier than most fans would like. Konami holds the rights and can keep making things tied to the IP.
Many fear what that looks like without the creator of the games attached.
Which is why a mod like this lands the way it does. Anyone who was a kid when this game first showed up could scarcely have dreamed of playing it online with a friend, and now someone’s built it anyway.
One game. Two players. One world. And it’s only the beginning, according to the guy making it.
