Platinum Games has teased a celebratory event for the 10th anniversary of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, the excellent hack-and-slash adventure that has gone on to have a second life as the source of countless memes. The game had originally been in development at Konami's Kojima Productions as Metal Gear Rising before being handed over to the action game specialists, who came up with the rather brilliant central mechanic of ripping out your enemies' spines to heal oneself, and the rest is high-octane history.
The game did get some (very good) DLC but, despite the positive reception and decent sales, it's been silence ever since. Given the subsequent Konami-Kojima fallout and the Metal Gear series being seemingly put on ice, a sequel has never felt less likely. And yet, now Platinum is announcing the game's upcoming 10th anniversary, along with the reveal of some new celebratory artwork.
／📢METAL GEAR RISING REVENGEANCE 10th Anniversary イベント予告👀＼2023年2月21日に『メタルギア ライジング リベンジェンス』は発売から10周年を迎えます🎊当日には10周年記念としてプラチナゲームズ公式Twitterで #MGR のアニバーサリーアートをお披露目しますのでお見逃しなく🔥 pic.twitter.com/d7fgPrwvHhFebruary 1, 2023
The tweet is a "10th Anniversary Event Notice" and reads (via machine translation):
"On February 21, 2023, Metal Gear Rising Revengeance will celebrate its 10th anniversary since its release. On the day of the event, we will unveil the #MGR anniversary art on PlatinumGames' official Twitter to commemorate the 10th anniversary, so don't miss it."
Pretty innocuous stuff but it has all fans, myself included, huffing generous amounts of copium while fantasising about filleting giant mechs 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 upcoming weeks!" Though funnily enough, that seems to have been the actor plugging his appearance on a podcast and an autograph stream to coincide with the anniversary. Flynn keeps on tweeting and re-tweeting about the game's anniversary though, so hope is not extinguished yet.
Both Hideo Kojima and Yoji Shinkawa have so far kept their own counsel, though it's extremely unlikely that they would be involved in any future Metal Gear project anyway. While a MGR: Revengeance 2 announcement does seem unlikely, Metal Gear fans will be hoping that this year Konami shows some signs of life: it's long been rumoured that the publisher is planning remasters of some of the Metal Gear Solid titles and, with absolutely nothing since the post-Kojima Metal Gear Survive in 2018, it's been way too long for one of the great videogame series. Oh well, at least we can celebrate when it used to be good with some art.
