In May, a group of dedicated fans set out to remake the classic 1987 Metal Gear. At this time, Konami had even approved the project! According to Ian Ratcliffe, one of the game’s organizers, Konami stated they can go along witht he project as long as it wasn’t for profit. Hell, they even managed to get the original Snake himself, David Hayter to record lines for a trailer!
Unfortunately, recently the project was shutdown, apparently Konami’s divisions couldn’t decide whether the re-make should go ahead or not.
Ratcliffe made a statement about the matter, here it seems like the biggest mistake was the fact that it was a verbal contract, and not a written one:
“The agreement was made verbally, we first got approval a couple of months back after being told to take the moddb page down. Following that Jay Boor from Konami UK, told me that the agreement was getting written up by Japans legal team. (We were contacted by a couple of guys from Japan initially but since it’s all been through Jay.) We were told to keep the page down as they wanted to make the announcement once E3 was out of the way.
I’m not really sure what happened to be honest, we had a lot of back and forth with Jay and he was in full support of the project. It seems that the whole of Konami was divided on whether we should go ahead or not but I think ultimately it was Japans decision.
I totally understand their reason in doing so, not matter how disheartened the team is, we thank them from the bottom of our hearts for all that they’ve done, Jay especially. Not to forget the huge amount of support we got from the fans, to which we’re more than grateful for. We got to work alongside industry professionals, it’s been really inspiring and I feel privileged to have been a part of it. We aren’t gonna be sour about the whole thing it’s the experience that counts.
We’re now in the planning stages of making our own IP, in the words of Liquid Snake – “It’s not over yet!””
What do you guys think? Konami hasn’t seem to have provided any reason apart from that the company was “divided” in some way. But why were they divided? As long as the game wasn’t making profit, it seems as if there isn’t a problem. It would have probably been good publicity for the Metal Gear franchise, seeing as Phantom Pain will be released at some point
