List of Characters in The Metal Gear Series - Creation and Designs

Creation and Designs

Much as Metal Gear began as a pastiche of action movies of the time, characters were pastiches of contemporary action movie heroes. Once Yoji Shinkawa started designing the characters in PlayStation's Metal Gear Solid, they were given their respective established visual appearances. As a result of the console's limitations, Shinkawa designed them an idea that would appeal to gamers. Because of the timeskip between titles, a few of the characters have been redesigned to fit in the game's year. With the improvements from new video game consoles like the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, the staff gave the characters a more realistic look starting with Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty although they initially had doubts about it. This brought difficulties to the staff as they had to make the faces more realistic. When illustrating characters, Shinkawa does not focus on their minor details, such as the eyes which sometimes does not try to draw, instead illustrating something more symoblic. While Solid Snake remained easy to illustrate as a result of him having a consistent design to the point Big Boss' younger self, Naked Snake, was conceived making minor changes to the original version of Solid Snake, other characters were more time-consuming owing.

During their debuts, player-characters Solid Snake and Raiden are meant to represent the player while in the following titles they acquire more defined personalities. As a result of the Snake's increasing experience in combat across the series, Kojima attempted creating more challenging antagonists for the boss battles. This resulted in Big Boss' clones from Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2 that had the same abilities as Solid Snake, the legendary Cobra Unit from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater who participated in World War II and the Beauty and the Beast Corps from Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots that had few human traits. While villains during the first games were given detailed backstories, the Cobra Unit members were intended to have little information known about them, resulting in a significant impact in the gamers upon their deaths following their boss battles. This gave Shinkawa difficulties in conceptualizing their visual appearances as a result of having little to no background details. By Metal Gear Solid 2, Kojima was inspired by the Sherlock Holmes novels to introduce a sidekick character in order to view Snake from a different perspective.

Metal Gear Solid also marks the first time that character were given voice actors with Solid Snake and Big Boss' younger self being voiced by Akio Ōtsuka. Ōtsuka remembers being surprised during his debut as a result of the large amount dialogue Snake was given. In the English adaptations, the casting was directed by Kris Zimmerman and supervised by a member from Konami. Solid Snake's voice actor was David Hayter who, despite having remarked some issues with some of the dialogues in Metal Gear Solid, became attached to the series.