The Metal Gear Solid 4 assistant producer Ryan Payton shared in an interview that the game had the potential to be ported to Xbox 360.
Imagine a world where you could play Metal Gear Solid 4 on the Xbox 360 on top of the PlayStation 3. Well, it turns out that reality was almost made possible. The game’s assistant producer Ryan Payton shared some new insights into the game’s porting capabilities in an interview for Steven L. Kent’s book The Ultimate History of Video Games Vol. 2.
Payton shared that there was no exclusive deal for MGS4 to be only on PS3; it all came down to how the Konami team would resolve the issue of the disc format. He also noted how there was a dedicated team to porting the game to Xbox 360. “Despite how downtrodden my colleagues were with developing on PS3, most of them were still hardcore Sony fans and were not in favour of spending resources on such a test,” Payton explained in the book.
He continued detailing how the team thought “Metal Gear Solid 4 would look and run terribly on Microsoft’s older and inferior hardware.” Apparently, the Konami R&D team held a meeting one day that showed off the game “running beautifully and smoothly on an Xbox 360.” So, it was possible! But there was a catch.
Payton regrettably stated how the port was technically possible but would be horrible on the physical level. PS3 games were ahead of the CD game by using BD-ROM discs that could hold up to 54 GB of storage versus Xbox 360 games that came on DVD-ROM discs that could only hold up to 8.3 GB. This would mean that for MGS 4 to be ported to Xbox 360 would require multiple discs, which Konami did not think would be viable.
While many fans from the green camp would have loved to see another MGS game make its way to the platform, it would have costed way too much. The final decision for the game only being released on PS3 was said best by Sony‘s Jack Tretton at the time: “Metal Gear Solid [4] is not only exclusive on PS3, it’s only possible on PS3 thanks in part to Blu-ray.”
In recent news, Konami announced last month that a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3, aka Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater would be released for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. They also announced that they would be releasing the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection series, Volume 1 of which will contain MGS 1-3 and the original Metal Gear and Gear 2. So, MGS4 will remain a PS3 exclusive to this day. Perhaps the second collection volume will finally see the port of the game.
