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.