

Shinkawa's Snake design features a dark grey bandanna, a consistent "sneaking suit", and the effective voicework of Akio Ohtsuka for Japanese versions and David Hayter for English versions of Metal Gear games as Snake's defining aspects. The character underwent an eight-year hiatus, until the release of the seminal Metal Gear Solid for Sony PlayStation in 1998, which fully established Solid Snake in his more popular, modern-day character design - which was made by artist Yoji Shinkawa. The development of that particular game convinced him to pursue a proper sequel to the original MSX2 title while ignoring the events of the NES games, titled Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, released for the Japanese market in 1990 around the same time North Americans received Snake's Revenge. When Metal Gear was ported to the NES, it sold well enough that Konami greenlit the development of a sequel specifically for the NES titled Snake's Revenge without Kojima's involvement. Snake's name, in fact, was derived from Escape from New York's main character, Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell). Kojima's main character for the game, codenamed Solid Snake, was likewise inspired by the heroes from those action movies, such as Kyle Reese (played by Michael Biehn) from The Terminator, whom Snake's first portrait was based on. Metal Gear franchise creator, Hideo Kojima, started off his franchise with the first Metal Gear for the MSX2 computer in 1987, as a pastiche of high-profile action movies at the time, such as Lethal Weapon and Escape from New York. series, appearing in the Nintendo fighting games Super Smash Bros. Previously popularized as a character to serve as an antithesis to the cheery and colorful Nintendo-inspired characters that were prevalent in games near the end of the 1980s, Solid Snake became the first playable third-party character in the Super Smash Bros. Solid Snake ( ソリッド・スネーク, Solid Snake), also known simply as Snake and by his real name David, is a major protagonist of the Metal Gear series, created by Konami. Human (augmented clone created via Les Enfants Terribles) Metal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Experience (2016, cameo) Official artwork of Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. For other uses, see Snake (disambiguation). For fighter info, see Snake (SSBB) and Snake (SSBU).
