Venom Snake with eyepatch and red bionic arm from Metal Gear Solid V

Metal Gear Solid V

2012viral videoclassic

Published September 6, 2026

Metal Gear Solid V is Hideo Kojima's two-part stealth action epic, split into the 2014 prologue Ground Zeroes and the 2015 open-world sequel The Phantom Pain. Its bizarre pre-release marketing, including a fake studio and a swapped-out voice actor, turned the game into a running online joke long before launch and fueled a fandom that still churns out Snake memes, Kiefer Sutherland impressions, and Konami rage videos.

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Overview

Metal Gear Solid V is the sixth mainline installment of Hideo Kojima's stealth series, published by Konami and split across two releases that share one story: the short prologue Ground Zeroes and the sprawling open-world game The Phantom Pain1. The player controls Snake as he rebuilds a private army and hunts the shadow group Cipher, but the fandom around the game latched onto everything except the plot summary, from Kojima's elaborate pre-launch trolling to the very audible fact that Snake sounded like Jack Bauer2.

The meme footprint of MGS V is less about a single image macro and more about a cluster of running jokes: the fake developer Moby Dick Studios, the Punished 'Venom' Snake stoner theory pushed by Game Theory, the 'ROCKETO PUUUNCH!!!!!' animation of Snake yeeting his bionic arm at Konami HQ, and the endless recycling of Kiefer Sutherland's gravelly 'Kept you waiting, huh?' line34. Fan art on pixiv and DeviantArt piled up in the thousands under 'MGSV' and 'the phantom pain' tags in the months after release1.

Because the game shipped in a famously unfinished state and Kojima and Konami parted ways during development, the fandom's tone drifted from hype to grievance, and Konami itself became the recurring villain of the joke. That shift is why the meme layer still gets recycled a decade later whenever Konami announces a Metal Gear remake or the next round of Silent Hill news drops1.

Origin & Background

Platform
PAX 2012 reveal / Reddit and YouTube (viral spread)
Creator
Hideo Kojima
Date
2012

Metal Gear Solid V's meme life started with its unusually theatrical rollout. On September 1st, 2012, at PAX Prime, Kojima Productions revealed a game called Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes1. Three months later, on December 10th, 2012, a completely different trailer for a game called 'The Phantom Pain' debuted at the Spike Video Game Awards, credited to a studio no one had heard of called Moby Dick Studios and fronted by a bandaged 'Joakim Mogren' whose name is an anagram of Kojima's1. Fans immediately noticed shared assets between the two trailers, and the guessing game ran for months.

Kojima confirmed the ruse at GDC on March 27th, 2013, revealing that Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain were two halves of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain1. That same day, Kotaku reported that longtime English Snake voice actor David Hayter had not been asked to return, and Kiefer Sutherland was voicing the new Snake instead2. The Hayter snub became one of the first true MGS V memes, kicking off years of jokes about Kojima recasting Snake for a Hollywood star while the character barely spoke in the finished game2.

How It Spread

The community started organizing almost immediately. On March 23rd, 2013, an r/MetalGearSolidV subreddit opened for game discussion and grew into a steady hub over the next few years1. Ground Zeroes shipped as a paid prologue on March 18th, 2014, for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, and its short runtime (some critics clocked the main mission at under two hours) became a meme in itself around review sites like Metacritic5. A Steam port followed on December 18th, 20151.

Ahead of the full release, YouTube did most of the heavy lifting. On January 27th, 2015, Game Theory posted a video arguing that Punished 'Venom' Snake was basically a stoner because of his in-game Phantom Cigar item, and the clip pulled in millions of views over the following months1. On July 18th, 2015, animator Kikenzo uploaded 'ROCKETO PUUUNCH!!!!!', a short cartoon of Snake ripping off his prosthetic arm and hurling it at Konami's Tokyo office, which racked up hundreds of thousands of views as anti-Konami sentiment peaked1.

The Phantom Pain launched worldwide on September 1st, 2015, and Metal Gear Online 3 arrived a month later on October 6th1. Launch week gave the fandom its next wave of ammunition: Let's Play channels like Game Grumps and Angry Joe posted long playthroughs, streamers looped Kiefer's 'Kept you waiting, huh?' intro, and pixiv logged more than 470 pieces under 'MGSV' by late September 2015 while DeviantArt cleared 8,200 hits for 'the phantom pain'1.

Frequently Asked Questions