Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan (opens in new tab)

I wonder how they must have felt to have coded a 9/11 scenario of Arsenal Gear crashing into the Twin Towers, and then watched it actually happen a few months later.

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

Everyone focuses on that part, but what the hell was with the girl that could repel bullets but it turns out that it was magnets but actually maybe she does have powers? And what about the weird thing where you start sword fighting your father/president/clone?

Yeah I know, sure, fake information on the internet. It's so prescient I guess, but the actual story is incomprehensible.

Including the cardboard boxes: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-ai-paul-scharre/

Surveillance states and mass media manipulation are a staple of sci-fi. Those topics were particularly common around that time too. E.g., The Matrix.

That’s great, now do kingdom hearts

What? He completely misses Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Luckily that's pretty straightforward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41v3L0zCkNY

Must have been having a stroke...

During the mainline of the game you are an anti terrorist specialist sent to rescue the president from a bunch of stereotypical mad bombers

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

Kojima knew that everyone had played MGS1 and were highly anticipating the sequel, so he deliberately trolled them all by baiting their expectations then subverting every single one by doing the opposite of what people wanted him to do. And he also spawned a lot of AI memes along the way.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation of Twilight Princess jumped from very little to basically 100% of core code in the past year alone: https://github.com/zeldaret/tp

I have no doubt that this would be possible for MGS2 as well.

Absolutely. This is just some delusions of a vibe coder at best. Not with just current generation of AI tools but essentially never. The conversion from C, C++, Rust or whatever, through post-processing (macros etc), through IR generation, through compile time optimizations, through link time optimizations, to the generated machine code is a one way street for low level languages. You can get a pretty close higher level approximation that matches the flow/logic/structure - but the code will never be anywhere near close to the original source code. I could write the same C++ program in 3 different ways and get identical assembly, how do you go back to the exact source? The answer is that you don't.

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.

if this leak is real... you probably could now. and as others have mentioned, similar code has been leaked before.

That's pre-2026 thinking. At this point, with the ability to lash IDA or similar tools to an agentic harness, there is no longer any such thing as a closed-source binary.

> It’s the real code there is code for known removed content (tanker escape scene and the 9/11 removed cutscene). Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet.

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.

>Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet.

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.

Raw assets are probably the better tell

It’s playable but nowhere near as good and a lot of criticism is warranted. A true ‘70%’ game.

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’m sure the builds from doing what i’ve been doing won’t generate identical bytecode but it’s fun for the sake of messing with the game or understanding it (eg. The checksum logic for newstowers save game logic was cooy pastable as was the whole save game structure formatting itself and clearly matches the game - it works!). Likewise with all the JA3 mechanics documented in that linked guide.

I think the only extra feature it has is the skating mini game. Now the og release of MGS2 US was interesting for the differences it has compared to even the JP release. US came first and is almost a kind of beta version.

I think what they're saying is the PS2 was notoriously hard to program for.

i'll bite: explain