8 Metal Gear games you definitely forgot about
The Metal Gear series is a stalwart of the video game industry. Long and storied, it has had more hands on it than just creator Hideo Kojima. However, these games regularly get left out of the conversation, mostly because they don’t have any general effect on the overall story and narrative the mainline Metal Gear series is known for.
These range from lost mobile games to even a motion-controlled arcade multiplayer game. Metal Gear’s forgotten titles are intriguing, even if some of them are rotten. Like Sunny in Metal Gear Solid 4, let’s crack this egg and remember what you probably don’t.
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It’s Metal Gear on the go!
- Release date: 2000
- Platforms: Game Boy Color
A bizarre but often forgotten entry in the long line of Metal Gear games. Returning to a Nintendo system for the first time since the 1990s Snake’s Revenge, Metal Gear Solid: Ghost Babel for the Game Boy Color is nothing short of fascinating.
This is a top-down stealth game, with all the classic elements returning from the MSX games but squeezed into a Game Boy Color-level game. However, as it harbors the “Solid” name, it integrates Snake’s specific abilities from the PS1 title into the mix. Sneaking is far more complex than the MSX titles, as you can knock on walls to distract guards or flatten yourself against the wall.
It can be a little simplistic, but the idea that the team behind it managed to squeeze Metal Gear into a Game Boy is spectacular. It has never seen a re-release anywhere else, and it’s a shame because I love the way that it looks. Snake’s pseudo-3D sprite scrambling across the screen is excellent.
7
Snake’s Revenge
All the parts, no MGS heart
- Release date: 1990
- Platforms: NES
For this, I feel I need to be positioned on a shabby futon, a wall full of games and merchandise (a future landfill) backing me as I rant into a camera.
This is one of those games that even the people behind the franchise would like to forget. It’s a sequel to the NES version of Metal Gear and not a particularly good game on its own. Developed to capitalize on the NES version of Metal Gear’s apparent success, Konami fired it under their Ultra branding to skirt Nintendo’s forced limitation on how many releases a publisher could do a year.
This was a common practice at the time. Some games like Noah’s Ark 3D got around Nintendo’s system entirely by making their own cartridges. Much like a majority of those games, Snake’s Revenge also mostly falls limp most of the time.
Snake’s Revenge is back to the top-down view of the 1980s and is ultimately just a very boring, quite safe sequel. It does have side-scrolling sections, but if you want that, Konami has already made Contra. The game is riddled with poor design decisions, like sifting through menus for minutes at a time and an ambition that never coalesces.
You can’t take this one home
- Release date: 2010
- Platforms: Arcade
A Japanese-exclusive arcade game built on Metal Gear Solid Online 2, Metal Gear Arcade is completely bizarre. It used a combination of motion and head tracking with a giant prop gun to control it. With the glasses on, you could also get a 3D effect — which was the style at the time — for that additional immersion element.
A few machines lined up in a row would connect to rush people through a more action-oriented version of the stealth multiplayer game. According to some arcade enthusiasts, it didn’t do well because it wasn’t very good. It turns out that when MGO2 is stripped back and hampered by a gimmick controller, it’s not the best experience.
Thanks to its exclusivity and being trapped on the arcade circuit, it quickly gets forgotten when people talk about Metal Gear. If you go through the right forums, you’ll find a salvaged version of the game that should run on modern PCs.
Lost to time, for good reason
- Release date: 2010
- Platforms: iOS | Android
It’s no wonder why Metal Gear Solid: Social Ops has been forgotten. It only lasted a year, shutting down in 2013. Launched exclusively in Japan, it combined elements of Peace Walker with Acid’s card game ethos, but made little to no splash after it launched.
Watching old clips, you can see why it failed. It looked choppy and sluggish. The card game element had more JPEGs overlaid on top of the screen, with numbers firing out of Peace Walker assets. Then, you get shuffled into various loot box sequences. A thrilling tactical espionage action game, indeed.
Social Ops was trying to ride the wave of Japanese gacha and high-spend games, but in an era dominated by Puzzle & Dragons and the like, it just couldn’t survive. There’s no way to play the game, even if the files are floating around the internet, as the servers have been shuttered. It’d be considered lost media by some.
Snake’s down at the pokies betting his week’s wage again
- Release date: 2016
- Platforms: Pachinko
If Social Ops makes you shudder, imagine catching a glimpse of Konami’s teaser for what looked like an MGS3 remake. Before Metal Gear Solid 3: Delta became one of our most anticipated games of 2025, Konami tarnished the good name and reputation of the series.
After MGSV’s release and the subsequent departure of Hideo Kojima, Konami walked away from publishing almost every video game franchise it owned. Silent Hills was canned, and Konami went all in on what made them money: friendly gambling. Using MGS3 as a base — they also have a Silent Hill-themed one — was laughable. It had these incredible-looking cutscenes and used them for a pachinko machine.
These super high-fidelity cutscenes were nothing more than background noise and a tiny reason to continue dumping your hard-earned cash into the machine. Thankfully, someone has captured the cutscenes on a camera for you to see, but it still sits like a horrid monkey’s paw, like more Metal Gear.
Metal Gear on an iPhone? What a concept!
- Release date: 2008
- Platforms: iOS
MGS Touch was released incredibly early in the iOS App Store’s life, and as such, it no longer exists outside of emulation and some very keen data hoarders. Even then, after just a few months and with development advancing exponentially with games on iOS, it quickly became a relic.
It was a weird time when the devices the App Store supported weren’t powerful enough for anything too ridiculous but featured no physical controls, a problem we’ve barely figured out to this day. The idea of MGS on a phone wasn’t new, but on an iPhone? That’s a novelty. As was the game, a basic rail shooter with Metal Gear theming.
MGS: Touch also stirred the pot at the time. It had a teaser campaign that was quickly rushed through, as it did look like Metal Gear Solid 4 might end up on the Xbox. Conversations online and even articles can still be found on some forums with that delightful ‘08 vibe — capslock and all.
2
Tiger Electronic’s Snake’s Revenge
This revenge is a little flat
- Release date: 1990
- Platforms: Tiger Game Talk
It’s incredible what you can find when you fall down into a rabbit hole. Snake’s Revenge on the Tiger Electronics handheld is an incredibly odd thing, as it’s possibly the first game in the series to feature voice acting. Released under Tiger’s “Game Talk,” it would say certain phrases to you as you thumbed through its simplistic design. The best thing about it that I’ve found is the advert that ran during the 1990s.
Unless you can find an actual unit, it’s not actively available anywhere, even on the Internet Archive’s backups of LCD games. A cursory glance at eBay shows that they are listed for well over $300 in some cases.
The N-Gage?!
- Release date: 2007, 2008 (N-Gage 2.0)
- Platforms: Brew, Java, N-Gage 2.0
Metal Gear Solid Mobile is endlessly fascinating to me. It launched in 2007 and 2008 across Brew, Java, and eventually the N-Gage 2.0 (the platform, not the phone), which is even weirder to think about. It’s no wonder the game gets quickly forgotten, as it was released just as everyone began to ditch their Nokia N95 phone and move to either Blackberry, iPhones, or the first in the wave of Android devices.
MGS Mobile inhabits that space of mobile games released on these styles of phones. Similar to Resident Evil and DOOM RPG, these full-fledged games try to emulate their console or PC native with a peculiar twist or limitation. MGS Mobile attempts and mostly succeeds at replicating the full MGS2 experience, with a few ideas carried over from MGS3, such as the camo system.
It’s also incredibly short, a glimpse of a universe that could have been. You can picture it if Apple had never taken an interest in phones and Nokia had retained its strength. As of right now, there’s no real legal way to acquire the game, but it does run great on an emulator.
Metal Gear games that are gone, but now hopefully not forgotten
Metal Gear’s forgotten games are still worth checking out if you can track them down. Snake’s Revenge might be a rotten game, but it’s still a fascinating thing in itself. What would a sequel to Metal Gear be if it were treated as a commodity instead of the artistic piece it became?
Even the trials and tribulations of trying to get the N-Gage emulator to work for an hour on a weird version of Metal Gear Solid are absolutely worth the effort. These forgotten games are utterly beguiling, whether for their weird quirks or for trying to adapt the series’ complexity to hardware that it was never intended for.
