Hideo Kojima Announces 'Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain'

Hideo Kojima showed up at his GDC event this morning head fully wrapped in bandages. That was the final giveaway that Moby Dick Studios was a ruse, and that The Phantom Pain was a Metal Gear game.

Turns out, it was Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, a game starring Naked Snake (aka Big Boss) some years after the events of Peace Walker.

The new trailer is a hodge-podge of Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain material, which is fitting since both those games are in fact one and the same. I have to hand it to Kojima: this wasn’t the most difficult puzzle to sort out, but it was a great, quirky way to build hype.

Most interesting to me is that the game we thought we knew about—Ground Zeroes—isn’t a game at all; meanwhile, the game we thought was a big prank (and which was, really) is the actual name of MGS5.

Here’s the trailer: