Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has remained exclusive to the PlayStation 3 since its release in 2008, but now, 15 years later, Xbox fans are learning that they could have also gotten to enjoy the Hideo Kojima game if it weren’t for hardware limitations and Konami’s arguably weird decision making.
Ryan Payton, a Kojima Productions employee, told Steven L. Kent for his Ultimate History of Video Games: Volume 2 book that his team had showed off MGS4 running “beautifully and smoothly” on the Xbox 360 to prove a point back in the day, but Konami wanted no part in it because such a port would have required multiple DVDs.
This wasn’t an issue at all for the PlayStation 3, as Sony’s third-generation system featured a Blu-ray drive, enabling support for much higher-capacity discs.
“Despite how downtrodden my colleagues were with developing on PS3, most of them were still hardcore Sony fans and were not in favor of spending resources on such a test,” Payton explained. “They believed MGS4 would look and run terribly on Microsoft’s older and inferior hardware. One fateful day, the Konami R&D team hosted a meeting where we got to see the fruits of their labor – Metal Gear Solid 4 running beautifully and smoothly on an Xbox 360. As one of the few unabashed Xbox fans in the office, I was excited.”
From a Time Extension report:
[…] Contrary to popular belief, there was no exclusive agreement for MGS4 to be a PS3 system exclusive, and this is evidenced by the fact that Konami assigned a team to work on testing the game on Xbox 360 to see if a full port would be possible.
The reason we didn’t see the game hit Xbox 360? The fact that Microsoft’s console used DVD as its game delivery media. PlayStation 3 used Blu-ray, which allowed for bigger games; MGS4 took up 50GB of space (even on PS3, it had to be published on a special double-layer Blu-ray, the first PS3 title to do so). Releasing the game on Xbox 360 would have required it to span multiple discs, and that was clearly a no-go for Konami.
Discussion (6 replies)
Join Discussion →Oh huh, interesting. How big is the game? Was it on just one blu-ray disc? What size BD? I think this is the first time I heard about a game not being on X360 specifically because of the size of the storage media. Brings me back to the 5th-gen days when games in development for Nintendo 64 had to abandon it cuz of the cartridge size.
I think Phantasmagoria came out on 7 discs for PC. This would've fit on 6 DL-DVDs.
I remember UT2K4 had two packages, one was a single DVD, the other was 6 CDs. Man, bringing me back to the days when PC and console games shipped one multiple CDs. I had long been used to games and other software coming on multiple floppies, but it seemed crazy to me when games needed multiple CDs. Haven't really seen the use of multiple discs since moving to DVDs, at least not going above 2 discs. I guess by the time that would've happened, physical game releases were moving to BDs. But MGS4 would have been an example of releasing a game on a bunch of DVDs, had they gone the X360 route. Too expensive I guess. Is a single BD cheaper than a few DL-DVDs?
I think RDR2 physical release was 2 BDs, not sure what size they were though.
Wasn't the latest Flight Sim like 10 DVDs or something?
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-flight-simulator-physical-edition-ships-on-10-dvds[/URL]
Still, nothing beat's Win95's 26 floppy install.
The Win95 floppy install.... I was there..... 1000 years ago. Before USB even existed.... but I did have a Zip drive for this kind of stuff.
Quick Google search claims that 11 games were released for the PS2 on DVD.
It also revealed 13 games on the PS4 that were released on at least two BluRay discs.