Konami will reportedly be at E3 this year in a big way. According to Andy Robinson via the VGC podcast, the world’s Premier makers of Pachinko machines may steal the show at the long absent trade event, with a new Castlevania game and a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.
In terms of the other older Metal Gear Solid games potentially being playable on modern platforms, Robinson said that as of one year or two years ago, being able to do so in some shape or form was in the cards, but it's now less clear what the situation is. "I would imagine that Metal Gear Solid 3, the remake, is going to be somewhat of a testbed for that," Robinson said.
Robinson also noted how Konami is "opening up to collaborating with more developers," though it wasn't clear if he was just talking about the Silent Hill series, or Konami's wider portfolio as well. Which, a quick scroll through wikipedia will tell you is mostly just rehashed iterations of Dance, Dance Revolution.
Some kind of Metal Gear Solid 3 remake has been rumored for a long while now, but there's been no official comment from Konami on the matter. Last October, the also long-rumored and repeatedly leaked Silent Hill 2 remake was revealed, which is being developed by Layers of Fear studio Bloober Team.
It’s been nearly a decade since the last non-pachinko, non-mobile Castlevania release—and, if we’re being honest, it’s been even longer since the last good Castlevania title. With the success of the extremely excellent Netflix animated series, you’d assume Konami would be keen to resurrect the beloved franchise and have it be more successful than the inconsistent Lords of Shadow reboot of the early 2010s.
As for Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, while you might think it would make more sense to remake the first game in the franchise first however, in the larger Metal Gear timeline, Snake Eater is the first title chronologically. It tells the story of Naked Snake AKA Big Boss, the character that Solid Snake from Metal Gears 1, 2, and 4 is a clone of. If you’re new to the Metal Gear franchise, and that sounds confusing to you, you have hit just the trippiest tip of the convoluted iceberg that is this series, so Konami could potentially be trying to mitigate as much of that as possible by releasing the remakes in chronological order.
This would support pointing new players to the still very modern Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, which is the next game in the timeline, giving them more real life time to remake Metal Gear Solid 1, and focus on giving characters those little touches that say “next gen AAA gaming experience” like, facial features.
Fun fact about me and Snake Eater: before I moved to the United States as a kid, my family and I visited a couple months earlier to look at schools and houses, which is when I excitedly picked up Metal Gear Solid 3, a game that had not released in England yet at that time to take back with me. This was also sadly my first lesson in what a region locked console was.
Those were dark times.