Over the past three decades, Solid Snake has become one of the most iconic video game heroes of all time. Thanks to Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear Solid stands as one of the pillars of stealth in video games—after all, it's not every day that someone just creates an entirely new gaming genre.
That being said, Metal Gear has never been all that subtle about where its influences come from. One of the most notable (and easiest to spot) is Snake himself: everyone's favorite sneaky soldier was inspired by Snake Plissken, the main character of John Carpenter's Escape from New York. The similarities between the two are obvious—Kojima even went so far as to give Solid Snake the code name 'Pliskin' while in disguise during Metal Gear Solid 2.
With so many overt similarities between the two characters, it should come as no surprise that John Carpenter could have sued Konami and Kojima. In fact, the company that owns the rights to Escape from New York pushed Carpenter to do just that. So, why didn't the lawsuit ever happen?
Well, according to Carpenter, it's because Kojima is a nice guy.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Carpenter spoke about a recent lawsuit in which CanalPlus (the company that owns the rights to Escape from New York) sued a French filmmaker due to the overt similarities between their films. While speaking about the company, Carpenter mentioned that they'd previously looked at suing Konami over Metal Gear, but he convinced them not to.
"[CanalPlus] wanted to also go after the video game 'Metal Gear Solid,' which is kind of a rip-off of 'Escape From New York,' too, but I told them not to do that. I know the director of those games, and he's a nice guy, or at least he's nice to me."
It's strange to imagine what could have happened if the lawsuit had gone through: Konami has been a big company for a long time, but there's no guarantee that they would have recovered from a major Hollywood lawsuit back in 1998. Basically, if Kojima hadn't been on good terms with Carpenter, Metal Gear Solid may have ended on the original PlayStation.
It just goes to show that being nice really does pay off ... especially in Hollywood.
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