Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 2 Just Shipped Three Originals

Master Collection Vol. 2 released August 27, bundling MGS4, Peace Walker, and the Game Boy Color spin-off Ghost Babel onto modern platforms for the first time. If the collection has you wondering what the originals looked like, here's where each one actually came from.

Two of the three are ordinary secondhand discs and UMDs in Japan, findable by the product code printed on the spine. The third is the odd one out, and it is worth explaining why.

METAL GEAR SOLID 4: GUNS OF THE PATRIOTS

メタルギアソリッド4 · PlayStation 3 · 2008 · Konami · product code BLJM67001 · VT006-J1

MGS4 was built for one machine and does not pretend otherwise. It shipped on a single dual-layer Blu-ray at a moment when that capacity was the PlayStation 3's headline advantage, and it spends it — the game installs each act before you play it, which is the trade Kojima Productions made to stream cutscenes and environments at the fidelity they wanted. The SIXAXIS controller is wired in too, from shaking off a grab to steering the Metal Gear Mk. II. It was also framed from the start as an ending rather than another entry: the game that closes out Solid Snake's story, released twenty-one years after the MSX2 original. Everything about the disc assumes the hardware it was pressed for, which is exactly why it took eighteen years to appear anywhere else.

Where to buy: Suruga-ya.jp (by product code) · Buyee · eBay
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METAL GEAR SOLID PEACE WALKER

メタルギアソリッド ピースウォーカー · PSP · 2010 · Konami · product code ULJM05630 · VP069-J1

Peace Walker is the entry that stopped treating a portable release as a shrunken console game. It is cut into discrete missions sized for a handheld session rather than one continuous infiltration, up to four players can drop into the same operation over ad-hoc wireless, and between deployments you are running Mother Base — recruiting staff, assigning them to divisions, and developing the weapons you take out next time. The Fulton recovery balloon that made all of that work starts here. Anyone who played MGSV first will recognise the whole apparatus on sight, because MGSV is what happens when this design gets a full budget and an open map. The PSP UMD is where it was worked out.

Where to buy: Suruga-ya.jp (by product code) · Buyee · eBay
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METAL GEAR: GHOST BABEL

メタルギア ゴーストバベル · Game Boy Color · 2000 · Konami · no product code on record

Metal Gear: Ghost Babel is the first Metal Gear made for a handheld, and it was made for the Game Boy Color specifically rather than ported down to it — a top-down infiltration game with its own level design, its own boss set, and a VR training mode. The story is a side branch, not a link in the main chain: it is set seven years after the original Metal Gear and ignores Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake entirely, so Outer Heaven comes back without the events the MSX2 sequel established. Outside Japan it was published under the name Metal Gear Solid, which is where a lot of the confusion around this game comes from, and why it is worth searching for by the Japanese title instead.

Of the three, this is the one that tends to ask the most secondhand — collectors point to the same three reasons: it was made with the overseas market in mind and its Japanese print run is generally reckoned to have been small, it has never had a physical reissue, and the Metal Gear name keeps demand up regardless. Kataban carries no price data, so treat that as the shape of the market rather than a figure, but expect it to cost more than the MGS4 disc or the Peace Walker UMD.

A note on finding it: Kataban has the release in its catalog, but the source data carries no product code for it — the field is empty, so there is no code to search a shop by, and no by-code buy link to give you. Search it by its Japanese name: メタルギア ゴーストバベル. That is also the name to type into a Japanese shop's search box; the English name will not find the cartridge there.

Where to buy: Suruga-ya.jp (by Japanese title) · Buyee · eBay
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Same Snake, Different Decade

The three games in this collection came out in 2000, 2008 and 2010, on a Game Boy Color, a PlayStation 3 and a PSP — a decade apart, on hardware with almost nothing in common, aimed at three different ideas of what a portable or a home console was for. Playing them back to back on one modern platform flattens that out, which is a fair trade for being able to play them at all. But if one of the three is the reason you bought the collection, the original is still on a shelf in Japan with its own box art, its own manual, and in two cases a product code you can search by. Start with whichever one caught you, and work backwards.