Solid Snake
Solid Snake (Japanese:ソリッド・スネーク, Soriddo Sunēku), whose real first name is David, is the main playable protagonist in the famous third-party Metal Gear stealth series created by Konami. Previously popularized as a character to serve as an antithesis to the cheery and colorful Nintendo-inspired characters that were prevalent in games near the end of the 1990's, special forces operative Solid Snake has become the first-revealed third-party character to feature as a playable fighter in the Nintendo fighting game Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
See Solid Snake (SSBB) for fighter info.
Character description
Metal Gear franchise creator Hideo Kojima started off his franchise with the first Metal Gear for the MSX2 computer in 1987 as a pastiche of high-profile action movies at the time, such as Lethal Weapon and Escape from New York, and Kojima's main character for the game, codenamed Solid Snake, was likewise inspired by the heroes from those action movies such as the character Michael Biehn from The Terminator. Snake's name, in fact, was derived from '"Escape from New York's main character, Snake Plisskin. When Metal Gear was ported to the NES, it sold well enough that Snake subsequently appeared in the sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. The character underwent an eight-year hiatus until the release of the seminal Metal Gear Solid for Sony PlayStation in 1998, which fully established Solid Snake in his more popular modern-day character design which was made by artist Yoji Shinkawa (see his above artwork). Shinkawa's Snake design features a dark grey bandanna, a consistent "sneaking suit", and the effective voicework of Akio Otsuka for Japanese versions and David Hayter for English versions of Metal Gear games as Snake defining aspects.
In a given Metal Gear-series game, the player assumes the role of Solid Snake (or a similar character depending on the game's scenario) as a special-ops agent and spy tasked to disarm and/or destroy what is usually a new incarnation of the eponymous bipedal mechanized nuclear-based superweapon, Metal Gear. He must always act alone initially each mission, sneaking and battling his way through enemy compounds armed with nearly nothing other than his two-way "codec" radio to receive transmissions from his commanding officer and other characters, a pair of binoculars, and as a bonus touch, a pack of cigarettes. His wits must always be sharp for him to rely on as he carries out sabotage-based assignments that seem immensely stacked against him in concept, and he must acquire his own firearms and rations and make use of environmental elements such as cardboard boxes (one of Snake's borderline-comical trademarks) to advance his various objectives. No mission Snake has ever gone through can be considered routine; each of his missions in the Metal Gear games is rife with all manner of epic drama, intrigue, double-crossings, betrayals, and revelations with wide-ranging implications for everything and everyone in the series.
Solid Snake's story begins as his father, codenamed Naked Snake, operates for the original FOX unit of the U.S. government at the height of the Cold War in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. He is heavily influenced by his mission's revelations where he finds out just how much he is a subject to the machinations of his government, so he splits away from the FOX unit and must deal with the revolt of his former FOX comrades in Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops; afterwards, he cofounds the FOXHOUND elite special force with Roy Campbell and becomes its commanding officer, "Big Boss". Big Boss takes part in a cloning project called "Les Enfants Terribles" to produce genetic clones of himself as his "sons"; one of them would become the FOXHOUND operative codenamed Solid Snake, grown to resemble Naked Snake almost identically.
In Metal Gear, Big Boss tasks the rookie Solid Snake to infiltrate the rogue nation Outer Heaven to sabotage its suspected Metal Gear weapon, but Snake finds out later that Big Boss is actually the leading man behind Outer Nation just like FOXHOUND, and Snake was deceived and set up by Big Boss to witness him using Metal Gear to establish Outer Heaven as a nuclear power, but Snake manages to sabotage the Metal Gear and defeat Big Boss. Roy Campbell takes Big Boss' place as commanding officer in FOXHOUND, and years later in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake Campbell assigns Snake to infiltrate a heavily fortified base in the nation Zanzibar Land who is also trying to become a nuclear power with the Metal Gear D model. Snake finds that the leading man behind this plot is Big Boss as well, and in a final confrontation after sabotaging Metal Gear D Snake kills Big Boss for good with a flamethrower. Both Solid Snake and Roy Campbell go into retirement after this.
In Metal Gear Solid, Snake is called out of retirement from Alaska by Campbell to battle FOXHOUND which has now gone rogue and has seized the nuclear weapons facility at Shadow Moses Island, threatening the U.S. with a nuclear strike unless they get Big Boss' remains. Snake must infiltrate the island and battle and defeat each rogue FOXHOUND member one-by-one, and he discovers and sabotages the Metal Gear REX model at Shadow Moses. Snake finds that the leading man behind this plot is an operative codenamed Liquid Snake, who is Solid Snake's genetic twin, and Solid Snake learns of his clone heritage. Solid survives while Liquid dies, and the mission is complete. Snake is called into service yet again in 2007 to infiltrate a tanker which gets sunk in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty's prologue sequence, but he survives and gets involved in the immensely intricate and complex scenarios that occur throughout the rest of game in 2009. Afterwards, by the time Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots for PS3 begins further in the future, Solid Snake has taken on a far more aged appearance caused by unnatural cellular degeneration processes within his clone body. His newest mission from Roy Campbell may answer many questions left open in the previous game.
Solid Snake, in his less-aged incarnation, has made many non-canonical game appearances, perhaps even more times than in canonical Metal Gear games. In addition to several supplemental and enhanced titles that have accompanied the "main" games (including bonus skateboarding segments for Snake to partake in), Snake has appeared in several alternate reality Metal Gear games, including a Game Boy Color Metal Gear Solid, and in the card-based Metal Gear Ac!d series for PSP. Solid Snake has also appeared as a playable character in two fighting games involving characters from other franchises. The first is Hudson Soft's DreamMix TV World Fighters, involving characters such as Bomberman and Optimus Prime from the Transformers franchise. The second is the Wii fighting game Super Smash Bros. Brawl alongside famous Nintendo characters such as Mario and Pikachu; his inclusion in the game generated an immense outburst across the game industry.
In Super Smash Bros. Melee
A popular story tells that during development of the Nintendo fighting game, Metal Gear series creator Hideo Kojima "practically begged" Sakurai to include the third-party character Solid Snake in the game as a playable fighter, but the addition was not viable because development of Melee was too far in. As a result, no mention of Metal Gear reposes in the game whatsoever. What would eventually happen is that Snake would become a playable third-party character in Melee's follow-up, Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
In Super Smash Bros. Brawl
- Main article: Solid Snake (SSBB)
Solid Snake makes his debut in the Smash series as a playable character in Brawl, using not real-world weaponry like in the Metal Gear games, but fighting techniques and more humorous utilities like a variety of explosives, including a Rocket-Propelled Grenade Launcher which he can use to attack the ground in front of him, possibly as a B-Move. Snake battles acrobatically and seems to be a floaty character, and he is seen using his punch-punch-spin kick fighting technique from the games. Snake is also described as being able to use a cardboard box like he does in the games, and in the Nintendo World 2006 trailer he is seen dashing and performing a special rolling maneuver that places him on the ground, ready to crawl, a new type of maneuver introduced in Brawl.
