Platinum Games held a 10th anniversary celebration event for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, the brilliant hack-and-slash adventure that has gone on to have a second life as the source of countless memes. The game was originally in development at Konami’s Kojima Productions as Metal Gear Rising before being handed over to the action game specialists, who found the rather excellent central mechanic of ripping out the spines of your enemies to heal itself, and the rest is high. – octane story.
The game did get some (very good) DLC, but despite positive reception and decent sales, it’s been quiet ever since. Given the ensuing Konami-Kojima phenomenon and the Metal Gear series seemingly put on ice, a sequel was never less likely. And yet, now Platinum is announcing the game’s upcoming 10th anniversary, along with revealing some new celebratory artwork.
／📢METAL GEAR RISING REVENGEANCE 10th Anniversary Event 👀＼On February 21st, 2023, “METAL GEAR RISING REVENGEANCE” will celebrate its 10th anniversary from its release 🎊 On that day, it will be a 10th anniversary event.アニバーサリーアートしますます目したので見逃しなる🔥 pic.twitter.com/d7HhPrwFebruary 1, 2023
The tweet is a “10th Anniversary Event Announcement” and states (via machine translation):
“On February 21st, 2023, Metal Gear Rising Revengeance will celebrate its 10th anniversary since its release. On the day of the event, we’ll be unveiling #MGR anniversary art on the official PlatinumGames Twitter to celebrate the 10th anniversary, so don’t I miss.”
Pretty innocuous stuff, but it has all the fans, myself included, sniffing copious amounts of kopi while fantasizing about filleting giant machines with a katana. Again.
None of this is helped by the fact that main character Raiden’s voice actor, Quinton Flynn, recently teased upcoming Metal Gear news: “Stay tuned for things to be announced in the coming weeks!” Although it is funny enough, this seems to have been the actor who connects his appearance on a podcast and an autograph stream to coincide with the anniversary (opens in new tab). However, Flynn continues to tweet and re-tweet about the game’s anniversary, so hope isn’t lost just yet.
Both Hideo Kojima and Yoji Shinkawa have so far kept their own counsel, though it’s highly unlikely they’ll be involved in any future Metal Gear project anyway. While an announcement for MGR: Revengeance 2 seems unlikely, Metal Gear fans will be hoping that this year Konami will show some signs of life: the publisher has long been rumored to be planning remasters of some of its Metal Gear Solid titles, and, without absolutely nothing. Since Kojima’s Metal Gear Survive in 2018, it’s been a long time for one of the great video game series. Oh well, at least we can celebrate when it was good with some art.