New Metal Gear Teaser Makes Gamers Green With Speculation

On Friday morning, Konami released a mysterious photo teasing about a new installment in the Metal Gear series, and the message boards have been overrun with rumors ever since. The teaser truly reveals nothing, combining the series’ iconic exclamation marks with the universal “power on” symbol, all of which is set on a jet-black background. Seems like a standard release teaser, right? But it’s the ad’s use of neon green—a color commonly associated with the Xbox brand—that has further ignited the already-flaming rumors that Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots will soon be adorning Microsoft’s console. Could this be true, or is Hideo Kojima once again messing with gamers’ minds?

By now, all of us should know that Kojima’s ad campaigns are not to be trusted, so all speculation should be taken with a grain of salt—this might actually turn out to be the next entry in the Solid series, not a port of a six-month-old game. Or, it might be hinting at a new Metal Gear series altogether, similar to what happened with Metal Gear Ac!d. And let’s face it: this would be fantastic news if either of these came true. But considering that Konami has openly mentioned the possibility of porting MGS4 over to 360, this new teaser contains more than a few hints that Old Snake will be sneaking around on Xbox 360 before long.

Not all greens are created equal.

For one, green has never been a prominent color in the MGS realm, which has tended to focus more on blues and reds. The closest thing I could think of as being iconically green in this series is the Codec screen, but even that has a slightly different hue than the neon seen here. No, this color scheme is eerily close to that of an Xbox 360 Elite. And while a lot of electronic appliances use the “power on” symbol, only one of them glows that eerie green.

Second, this teaser does not say that this is the “new” Metal Gear; it only says that it is the “next” one. In other words, this seems like more of an announcement akin to those of MGS2: Substance and MGS3: Subsistence, a sub-release of sorts that isn’t meant to garner the same fanfare as an altogether new entry. So combine neon-Xbox-green with MGS sub-release and you get…

Speculation. That’s all I’m willing to offer. But there’s nothing wrong with non-PS3 owners getting excited over potentially nothing, right?