Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain made an appearance at The Game Awards 2014, as did series creator Hideo Kojima. Now, internet speculators are theorising that the veteran developer may just have revealed something else…
It’s all down to the tee shirt Kojima was wearing. No, wait, I know what that sounds like but hear me out.
As summarised in this Reddit thread, Kojima was wearing a shirt with “tjugoandra den sjätte” written on it. That’s a slightly clunky bit of Swedish that reads “twenty-second and sixth”. Fans believe that may be the release date for The Phantom Pain – June 22, 2015.
So far, so spurious. It gets interesting when you recall that the game was originally disguised as simply The Phantom Pain without the Metal Gear Solid prefix, and was listed as under development by a fictional developer and studio, Joakim Mogren and Moby Dick Studios, based out of Stockholm.
June 22, 2015 is a Monday rather than the more traditional US release date of Tuesday, but that doesn’t rule it out completely. Heavy-hitting titles can pretty much set their own release schedules, after all. And come on, you know Kojima loves cryptic stuff like this.
In other news, written in Comic Sans down the side of Hideo’s trousers was the release date for Silent Hills. Okay, I’m kidding now. Konami has only confirmed that Metal Gear Solid 5 will be released sometime in 2015.