One artist is reimagining the first Metal Gear you've never played as an anime follow-up to The Phantom Pain

Official remakes can be hit or miss for me, but one thing I always love to see is a fan reimagining: It can be lower stakes and unbound from questions of approachability or profitability. Enter Mitchell Hammond, who's been reinterpreting the primeval, 1987, MSX2 original Metal Gear game as an anime informed by later entries in the series⁠—all sans AI image generation.

Metal Gear Solid really blew the doors down, but it's the 2D, 8-bit Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 for Japanese MSX computers where the series began. You can observe the beginnings of Hideo Kojima's signature style, particularly in Metal Gear 2, and these are the games that actually show Snake's battles with Big Boss⁠—as well as body double and MGS5 protagonist, Venom Snake⁠—that would reverberate for the rest of the series.

It's Hammond's character sheet for an older Venom Snake that really stole my heart: It cleverly combines elements of Metal Gear's original art, the '80s action flicks that inspired it, and Yoji Shinkawa's later designs. I love Venom's Mad Max leg brace, his military general uniform/jumpsuit (complete with necktie), as well as the cutaway revealing further cosmetic surgery to hide Venom's helicopter debris devil horn. Old Venom's design has that attention to detail and sense of ergonomics I always associate with Shinkawa.

Hammond has also produced character sheets for Metal Gear's various goofy bosses, a delightfully cheeky Time Magazine cover featuring Big Boss, and a few trailers and sequences of a planned full animated retelling of Metal Gear. Hammond's first trailer from 2022, set to the original chiptune soundtrack of the game, shows scenes from Metal Gear alongside corresponding animated recreations.

Most recently, Hammond uploaded a video in August showing Venom piloting the original Metal Gear and launching a missile, with Hammond's interpretation of a VR, head-tracking pilot's helmet in particular reminding me of Akira Toriyama's tech and vehicle designs.

The Metal Gear MSX animation seems to firmly be a "when it's done" side project for Hammond, but if you want to support the artist, he has Patreon and Ko-Fi pages. If you'd just like to keep abreast of updates, you can follow Hammond on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.