Two players. A 1998 PlayStation game that was never built to do this. That’s the pitch — and there’s footage already backing it up.
A co-op mod for the original Metal Gear Solid is in the works from YouTuber Felipe, and the trailer posted to his channel makes the project look far more advanced than any fan effort has a right to be.
A release date for the finished version hasn’t been given. What has been given: a description laying out precisely how far he intends to push 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.”
Not a remake, not a reimagining — the 1998 release itself, taken apart and reassembled for online play. Emulation is the ingredient that makes it work.
The camera is the problem waiting to happen
There’s one technical snag worth keeping an eye on. The original uses a top-down, overhead camera, and that turns awkward in a hurry once two players drift apart from one another. That’s the hurdle.
The rest of it already looks pretty great in the footage. The hope is that by the time it launches, it feels as natural a part of the game as anything Konami put in there themselves.
Why the first Solid still earns this kind of attention
A place among the best games of the PlayStation 1 era is something the original Metal Gear Solid has more than earned. It carried the series into 3D for the very first time and demonstrated what the whole thing was capable of becoming.
A lot of entries came after it. Every one of them twisted the formula in its own direction, and every one of them turned out great by its own standards.
Still, the first Solid game — or the third Metal Gear, depending how you’re counting — has something the rest lack. Return to it today and it holds up, provided you’re willing to shrug off a handful of archaic habits it never outgrew.
Konami owns the name. That’s the part fans keep chewing on
With Hideo Kojima no longer on the Konami train, the franchise’s future looks murkier than most fans would like. The rights sit with Konami, which is free to keep producing things attached to the IP.
What that ends up looking like without the games’ creator involved is a worry for many.
Which explains why a mod like this hits the way it does. Anyone who was a kid when the game first appeared could scarcely have dreamed of playing it online alongside a friend — and somebody has gone and built it regardless.
One game. Two players. One world. And per the man building it, this is only the beginning.