Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan
thegamer.com
thegamer.com
We know from reverse engineering efforts, and accounts by developers on the PC port, that all of the mainline MGS games used a proprietary scripting system called GCX. This was effectively a Konami fork of TCL - see eg https://github.com/Jayveer/Gcx
Konami built a custom lighting format for at least MGS3 called LA2, and a proprietary audio format called SDT. So far these haven't been reverse engineered - the leak will definitely open up progress there.
A Good Enough Summary of Kingdom Hearts
Yeah I know, sure, fake information on the internet. It's so prescient I guess, but the actual story is incomprehensible.
You're almost there. Double the convolutions in your post and you'll finally understand Kojima.
And yes, that chick really does have to be topless, its not sexism. See, she breathes through her skin. Thats why she's such a good sniper
apply this logic to john carpenter movies and they fall apart, too.
Escape from LA is just about as absurd, just less paranormal.
Nuclear powered personal submarines, surfing typhoon waves from California plate shifts, transforming bullet-proof stealth helicopters, emp superweapons and engineered DNA-tailored superbugs ( or atleast the claim of them ) , VR replacing reality, Cuba taking over the democratic world after a theocratic US rescension.
it's just entertainment campiness. When I play a Kojima game I just sort of imagine it internally as a video game equivalent to a John Carpenter movie.
Thanks!
edit: the soundtrack sure was a banger at the time
I even enjoy the story, but I view the story as something like a soap opera; a story that is extremely compelling and addictive as you're watching it, but upon turning it off you find yourself questioning what it is you just watched.
I don't know, this is starting to hit to close to home.
Kojima always has some paranormal activity in his games. And he does like to subvert expectations about what is technology and what is paranormal
MGS always rides the line between "it's actually just tecnology" and "no, it was really supernatural." This is true of Psycho Mantis in MGS1 as well, and The Sorrow in MGS3 is literally a ghost. I assume that Kojima has read up on the Stargate Project and other psychic soldier projects and likes to think about "what if one of those bore fruit?" Anyway, in the context of Fortune, it's a dramatic take on that: her powers were actually a magnetic device planted on her by The Patriots, but ACTUALLY actually she really does have some psychic ability which allows her to fight Ocelot in her final moments.
> And what about the weird thing where you start sword fighting your father/president/clone?
Well, that's actually pretty straightforward. You fought Solidus Snake, who was the third clone of Big Boss, and the "main antagonist" of the game (scare quotes because arguably the Patriots are the real antagonists). At the end of the game, it is revealed that Raiden's girlfriend Rosemary is a) real, b) alive, c) pregnant and d) being held captive by the Patriots, and they task Raiden with killing Solidus if he ever wants to see her again. Why a sword fight? I dunno, some things we must simply chalk up to "because it's cool."
If you want to dive further into who Solidus was, yes, he was also a pseudo-father to Raiden, in the sense that Raiden was raised as a child soldier and Solidus was (at the time) his commander. Solidus was President during the events of MGS1 under the name George Sears, but by MGS2 he's leading the Sons of Liberty as part of his anti-Patriots plot. Unfortunately, Ocelot is still working as a Patriots double-agent at this point, and Raiden's involvement is in turn orchestrated by the Patriots, so it doesn't quite work and the whole operation is manipulated from the start.
Like you have a giant bipedal (well... most of the times) autonomous robot armed with a nuclear tipped missiles launched by a railgun which can destory the whole countries ... and the said robot is defeated by shoot-out against a human.
I'm just kidding. That game doesn't have an ending.
This was cut from the game but is still in the source code leak, just commented out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNSPx-oRV60
Also note that the source code was leaked on April 30th :p
I only watched it a few years later, and I had to double check the airing date.
- Volgin is not an agent
- Snake is an agent (USA spy)
- The Boss is a double agent (Soviet/USA spy)
- Eva is a triple agent (USA/Soviet/Chinese spy)
- Ocelot is a quadruple agent (GRU/KGB/CIA/Philosophers spy)
And of course, after that Volgin then kills Granin thinking he was the spy, but he wasn't.
Well, basically, the leader of the terrorists is the 43rd US president, who is a clone of a super soldier despite being ostensibly anti cloning in office. (Yes, he's Dubya). He's planning to detonate a nuclear weapon above Manhattan so an EMP field knocks out all communications. The reason being that the government has been taken over by a conspiracy called the Patriots who are using a sinister AI to filter all internet traffic
However Dubya has been double crossed by an old Russian guy who was infatuated with the super soldier Dubya was cloned from. He claims to be representing the Patriots but suddenly his arm comes to life, claiming to be Dubya's brother. Oh, by the way, he lost his arm and got a transplant from the body of the other clone, Dubya's brother. It's implied in this game to be a supernatural occurrence.
Ghost Dubya 2 (in the body of elderly Spetznaz guy) goes on a rampage and tries to kill everyone. Dubya and the anti terrorist specialist end up fighting on top of Federal Hall, which if you've ever been to Manhattan is just next to the NYSE and TJ Maxx.
When you're there the Patriots phone you and they claim to be dead. Well, not dead exactly. They claim that in the same way life emerged from organic chemicals, life has emerged from the neural net of ideology and content published on the internet. Kind of like if ChatGPT became a bit uppity. They claim that Western Civilization is too corrupt and contradictory to be left in the hands of humans. You have to kill Dubya who is somewhat of an anti hero and it's kind of sad
Eventually another brother of Dubya who is kind of the hero does some digging, and his bromance partner discovers that the Patriots were real people but they all died 100 years ago. Also they were funding the real heroes all along!
It makes a lot more sense in MGS4
I watched the Dunkey video linked elsewhere and thought he was making it up, he wasn't? The whole story is just random stuff happening?
But all MGS games are basically playable Kojima manifestos with sci-fi trappings. The actual minute-to-minute gameplay for them is really, really good so even if you don't dig the story they're worth playing.
The previous poster is right that MGS4 does clear a lot of this up. But MGS4 also slams more weirdness and callbacks to the previous games on top of it.
everything about them makes sense when you think of them as Naruto or Onimusha but with a gun fetish.
It's one of those weird things, because the stories are kind of incomprehensible, but they're compelling in the same way that a soap opera is; while you're watching and playing, the story is very addictive and it doesn't feel that confusing as it's going on. There are even evil twins!
The moment I turn the games off, I kind of start thinking "....what the hell actually happened there?".
They do try and have a moral associated with it (though they do one of my pet peeves and just outright explain the themes they're going for at the end), so it's not completely trivial.
The games are a lot of fun, and they are certainly worth playing through in an emulator or something. I've played through the first MGS three times, and the second one twice, and I thoroughly enjoyed them both times, even rewatching the story unfold.
Welcome to Metal Gear Solid. Half the fun is creating a coherent narrative out of the sheer number of random postmodern happenings. You should see MGSV. Its entire existence is an attempt to connect the series back to the original excuse plots of the original Metal Gear games from the 80s.
Thank you, my friend.
I played that game and it did not.
To be clear, great game, banging music and design, and the multiplayer was a ton of fun. 10/10, do recommend.
But the story was "wtf?"
https://boards.4chan.org/vr/thread/12541637/metal-gear-solid...
The re-constructed URL:
Almost no coverage on HN or mainstream media though. Surprising, considering the popularity of this game.
Decompiled code is great, but having access to the “real” code gives you more insight into design decisions and directions.
I’ve been having fun lately with agents and decompilation. You can literally point them at any game and ask them to decompile the game and structure and format as if it was the original source code. Asking them to ensure it compiles works fine.
Some proof: i made online save game editors for jagged alliance 3; grandcheaten.com and news tower; thedailycheat.com (.com domains are only $10 so i figured why not).
You can do this with any game i’ve found. Older games work best due to the forced simplicity of the source code though.
>and ask them to decompile the game and structure and format as if it was the original source code. Asking them to ensure it compiles works fine
lot of people claiming this the end result is the AI downloading an emulator and rom
Did you try the above links? I haven’t shared the full source but all game mechanics listed in the ja3 guide including code snippets where helpful.
There are lots of decompilation community efforts for N64 games, etc.
Someone should train a model on this. Giving the decompiled symbols good names, etc.
De-minification and de-obfuscation while we're at it.
It should be easy to generate a ton of "synthetic" (actually real) training data for this by simply compiling sources and using that as (input, output) pairs.
Gunplay is weak. Accuracy drops off waaaay too fast based on maximum range of the gun and burst fire has arbitrary damage reduction per bullet. So short range guns almost always missed (mechanics documented from source in the above guide) and if they hit they did little damage. It means the only viable weapons are long range weapons. Rifles and assault rifles. A submachine gun is worse than a sniper rifle even at close range.
The plot has a key gameplay changing moment that triggers waaay to early meaning you have to work to see much of the game content. Everyone tries to avoid the trigger on the second playthrough which is a silly thing to do game design wise. A desire to teleport across the map was the original motivation to the above from my point of view.
Enemies are bullet sponges in the late game too. A lame way o balance weak ai and gunplay.
It could have been as good as ja2 but they just didn’t refine the above enough.
I have no doubt that this would be possible for MGS2 as well.
The challenge here is readability. Reading the TP source leak you link I think it's even behind the current state of the art, as it's barely above assembly. This is where I suspect even the smallest of LLMs may help, since you don't care that much if it introduces errors.
Only in a very rudimentary sense and definitely not in a working compilation (much less binary equivalent) sense. LLMs have turned this from a gimmick for static analysis into something that actually works pretty well for recompilation projects.
Working is the easy part; the hard part is getting something that classifies as readable C. LLMs do not really help reach the "working compilation" part but benefit from it.
>I disagree that they're good at writing compilable code
That was never part of the discussion, because as explained several times now it is irrelevant in this case. The existence of the original binary means all you need to do is match up things, which can be automated completely.
The problem is readability. No one in his right mind would call what they generate "C++". Mine still interjects assembler from time to time (and not the new version that GCC supports, but the older MSVC style) .
LLMs absolutely do not help with the generate working code part, because this is an exact problem that doesn't need nor benefit from an LLM (other than maybe automating stupid iteration?). They can help with the readability part, because here once you already have a working skeleton it doesn't matter that much if they make mistakes, as it is easy to detect.
If what you said was true, the projects mentioned above wouldn't have needed years of arduous work before the age of LLMs came to be.
I have been working on an incremental decompilation-based reimplementation (basically how OpenRCT2 was done) of Worms Armageddon for the past 2 months with a lot of help from LLM tools; primarily Claude Code and Ghidra MCP. I've worked on it almost every day, reaching Claude Code Max 5x's 5 hour session limit multiple times every day. Suffice to say as a software rendered, sprite-based 90s PC game, Worms Armageddon is several orders of magnitude simpler than MGS2. Despite that, I think it will be 2-3 more months of work before I can compile a fully independent version of the game.
This is despite the game being an almost ideal candidate for automated RE, as it uses deterministic game logic with built-in checksum checks in replays and multiplayer. I've downloaded all the speedruns I could find for the game (as replay files) and I've retrofitted the replay system into a massively parallel test framework, which simulates over 600 games in about 30 seconds. So Claude can port all game logic independently without much need for manual testing; the replay tests can almost guarantee perfect correctness.
MGS2 doesn't have anything like that, so every ported function requires extensive manual testing. Even with LLM tools, an accurate decomp could take years (unless you're willing spend thousands of $currency per month on it).
For those wondering, there is a public Git repository at https://github.com/paavohuhtala/OpenWA.
What is the experience faulty decompilation, and the existence of bugs in the binary?
Could one decompile a binary to a more modern language than C?
Here's the same simple program, written in 3 different ways, producing identical binary compatible code: https://godbolt.org/z/qWrc8fEnn
How does the AI know whether it should produce back the snippet #1, #2 or #3? It does not. It cannot.
Barring obvious edge cases that could show up but don't usually, like intentional race conditions. Timing is the one area where things get iffy.
The person I'm replying to? Who said you will get the same code as if it were the original source?