You never forget your first Metal Gear – yet there’s one title in Konami’s legendary stealth series that is universally heralded as its pinnacle: 2004’s Snake Eater. This prequel-cum-threequel was something of a reset. Originally intended as a PS3 game thanks to its sheer technological ambition, but then released on PS2, writer and director Hideo Kojima yearned to take gravelly voiced protagonist Solid Snake away from dimly lit military bases and have him slither outdoors. Featuring hunting for food and snapping broken bones back into place, Snake Eater felt more grounded and immersive than any of its 2000s PlayStation peers.
Yet for all Snake Eater’s sweeping changes, one classic element remained intact – the stellar voice acting. It’s telling that as Konami releases its remake, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, every wonderfully absurd line of the original script remains untouched. Boasting modernised controls and lavish new visuals, Delta feels closer to a 4K restoration of a cherished film than a maximalist Resident Evil-style remake.
“To their credit, Konami didn’t want to change it or make it a different thing,” says David Hayter, the voice of Solid Snake. “They really wanted it to feel like the original experience, just updated to today’s technology.”
Hayter, who is also a screenwriter (he penned 2000’s X-Men film and its 2003 sequel), remains immensely proud of his role as Solid Snake, attributing his quirky performance to the unusual way the actors recorded. “When we did the first Metal Gear Solid, we recorded it in this weird house in Hollywood,” he says. “They had five mics set up, and it was just me and the other actors, and we did it all like a radio play.”
It was an unusual setup: in games, voice actors largely record separately, their performances stitched together in post. Hayter found this method highly effective. “I asked it to be in my contract that we would do every other game the same way. For every Metal Gear game, I would just go into the booth and then the greatest voice actors in the world would come in and act with me for months. Having that experience on all of the games was just such a gift for a young actor.”
Whereas Metal Gear Solid was largely finished when the actors recorded their roles, for Snake Eater, they were just given their cues, the spectacle left largely to their imagination. “We weren’t seeing anything,” Hayter says. “It was very difficult to grasp the full gravity of what we were doing at the time.”
It’s a memory shared by Hayter’s costar Lori Alan, the voice of Snake Eater’s mentor and Russian double agent, the Boss. “That’s where the voice director comes in – who was amazing,” says Alan. “A recording session for this particular game is so intense. You come out and you’re like, ‘Oh my God!’ [The voice director] is in your ear whispering: ‘You love him. You trained him. You’re leaving your country!’ … It was amazing. You really do leave quite exhausted and fulfilled at the same time.”
While Hayter has completed every game he’s been in, once Alan left the booth, she never truly knew the impact of the character that she’d brought to life. “We have incredible fans who have sent me bits, but I’d never played it,” says Alan. Now, 21 years later, she’s finally seen the iconic character she helped bring to life. “We were doing some promo videos for the remake,” says Hayter. “Lori said she wanted some advice on what we did 20 years ago, but it’s a little complicated to explain! So I sent her the full cutscenes from the game … and an hour or two later, I got a call and she was just in tears, [saying]: ‘Oh my God. I didn’t understand. I get it now.’”
“It really is so cinematic,” Alan adds. “The complexity of the relationships is so at the forefront, it gives me chills. I got really immersed and caught up in a way that I just should have from the beginning. It’s like watching an amazing film or reading a wonderful book. I can see why you would go back to it again and again.”
Aside from some vocal cleanups and lines about the new control schemes, the cast tell me that they didn’t add anything new to Delta. “I like to think that I’m a better actor today than I was back then,” says Hayter. “But these recordings had to match the originals perfectly – and to step into the booth and do the same role 20 years later was pretty surreal.”
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It’s not just Hayter and Alan who have returned to the jungle: Cynthia Harrell, the singer of Snake Eater’s iconic theme, re-recorded her James Bond-esque anthem for the remake. According to Harrell, she recorded her vocals with little to no direction: “I just went into the booth and laid down what felt right. I had no idea how it would sound until I actually heard it finished, and it was like, oh, wow! [Spoiler alert] That ending scene, when you’re hearing the song and she’s dying, and the red petals are coming down … even after 20 years, I still cry.”
It’s a scene that still hits decades later, forcing the players to pull the trigger after an emotional final showdown – whether they want to or not. “I wanted them to put in an option where you could just shoot [the Boss] in the leg, but no dice,” says Hayter.
While the very public falling out between Kojima and Konami means that Snake Eater’s director didn’t work on Delta, the publisher recruited members of the original development team to help. “For me, that thrill and that amazement I felt 21 years ago playing for the first time – that is the experience we really want to bring back,” says Yuji Korekado, producer on Delta and part of the original team. Fellow producer Noriaki Okamura adds that the aim was to be creatively conservative: “We decided that it was not necessary to add in twists or new plot points. We felt that there was no need to change what was already great to begin with.”
Now, with a whole generation growing up without knowing their Raiden from their Revolver Ocelot, Hayter sees Snake Eater Delta as the perfect reintroduction to one of gaming’s most beloved series. “Somebody asked me last night, why did they start remastering with number three?” he says. “It’s because that’s the one, you know? The characters are amazing, the story is perfect – these are some of the most tragic and beautiful scenes in gaming history. It’s like living inside a great movie for 60 hours. They’re all great games, sure, but Snake Eater is the one.”
