This Is How It Ends: Big Boss Part 1

He looks so care free. Standing there, whoring a Japanese gelatin energy supplement. Simpler times.

Who knew that thirty years down the road he'd have one less eye, a nuclear-tank kingdom, and a clone offspring attacking him? Poor Big Boss. With Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots a little over a week away (be still my beating heart), it seems appropriate to have a little (minute really) look at the oft-forgotten portion of the Metal Gear series - the two pre-Solid MSX releases - and how they wrapped up the life of sometime series protagonist: Big Boss.

Set in disaster year 19XX; 1987's Metal Gear saw rookie special forces shitkicker Solid Snake infiltrating garrison country: Outer Heaven. Tasked with destroying a walking mecha-tank capable of launching ICBM's from any terrain, our hero receives intel throughout from FOXHOUND unit commander Big Boss. Towards the end of the game Big Boss' information begins to willfully mislead the player, endangering Snake. Oh no! Big Boss is later revealed to be the brains behind Outer Heaven, Snake's mission being little more than a training / misinformation exercise that has become too successful.



The years had not been kind.

This isn't quite how it ends: Metal Gear's final confrontation sees Big Boss battling his successor in the apocalypse countdown remains of his soldier empire. After Snake trashes the inoperable Metal Gear TX-55, he makes his way through a grim prison cell like warehouse and confronts his betrayer. Big Boss is dispatched with little fan-fair. He just sort of explodes and disappears. Interestingly no mentions are made of any biological link between Snake and Boss - an anti-development that was retconned for the first of the Solid series.



If the above video wets your appetite, why not have a crack at the bundled update of Metal Gear in the Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence set? You'll regret you did! Not because of any lapse in quality, rather because it is 8-bit unforgivingly tough. It does not want you to win!

Failing that there's a truncated NES version floating around, Kojima himself tactfully describes it as "complete garbage". It's this version that was bundled with the Japanese Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes Gamecube console set. Check out Michael Biehn on the cover!



In the US version of the NES release, Big Boss suffered the indignity of being rechristened: Colonel Vermon CaTaffy by the snarky pack-in manual. Topical!

Death and several nuclear scale explosions didn't slow wily old Big Boss down though, he'd be back for both a 'true' Hideo Kojima helmed follow-up, and an action orientated sequel sop for Western audiences. Hooray! Look out for Part 2 tomorrow. It will follow much the same pattern.