Probably the most notable of these was the grueling boss battle with The End. I distinctly remember looking at the clock in my old bedroom at my parents’ house after having finished it and seeing that it took around an hour and a half to complete.

In typical Kojima fashion, there are multiple victory conditions of the battle. My chosen path was to sneak up behind him with the tranquilizer pistol the requisite number of times (3, if video-game convention and my own memory are correct) to knock him out. This yielded his armor, the only 100% stealth camouflage in the game and a fitting reward for the patience I had to practice during the battle.

There were so many points during this battle where I was on the verge of abandoning my plan and taking him out the “easy” way, but I felt that had to press on, to prove it to myself that I could do it. His thermal footprints on the ground were a constant reminder that he was right around the corner, taunting me. I loved every minute of it.

It was only after having completed it that I found out one of the alternate win conditions, another little part of the game that truly screamed “Kojima.” If the Playstation 2′s internal system clock were set to a week after the timestamp on the save created at the beginning of the boss fight, the battle would automatically complete upon loading the save, as The End would die of old age, supposedly while the system was powered down. Though this is not the route I chose, it still makes me happy to know that it was included. This is an example of one of the many things Kojima does notably better than his contemporaries: breaks the fourth wall in a delightful way. To me, this harkened back to the first game, with Meryl’s codec frequency stamped on the back of the jewel case, or the infamous Psycho Mantis “controller pull” trick. I can’t help but love this man’s out of the box (and out of the screen) thinking.

Anyway, I wanted to thank you for jogging my memory of Metal Gear Solid 3 and writing this awesome piece about it.