Metal Gear Solid 4 ran flawlessly on Xbox 360, says producer

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots assistant producer Ryan Payton said in Steven L Kent’s book The Ultimate History of Video Games Vol 2 that the game ran perfectly on the Xbox 360, but the disc format used on the Microsoft’s console prevented it from being released there, with it claiming that it did not have an exclusive deal with Sony to release the game only on the PS3.

Payton said that at some point Konami set up a team dedicated to seeing if the game could be ported to the Xbox 360.

“Despite how overwhelmed my peers were with PS3 development, most of them were still hardcore Sony fans and weren’t in favor of spending resources on such a test,” explains Payton in the book. “They believed Metal Gear Solid 4 would look and run terrible on Microsoft’s older, inferior hardware.”

“On one fateful day, Konami’s 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.”

PS3 games used BD-ROM (Blu-ray) discs with a storage capacity of up to 54GB, while Xbox 360 games came on DVD-ROM discs which only held 8.3GB. As a result, Metal Gear Solid 4 on Microsoft’s console would require multiple discs, something Konami was unwilling to do.

Interestingly, then-Sony President and CEO Jack Tretton said at the time that “Metal Gear Solid 4 is not just PS3 exclusive, it’s only possible on PS3 thanks in part to Blu-ray.”

Konami recently announced the remake of Metal Gear Solid 3 for PS5, Xbox Series and PC along with Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1, which contains Metal Gear Solid 1-3 as well as Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2.

Speaking a little more about Metal Gear Solid 4, it remains a PS3 exclusive to this day. It remains to be seen whether Konami intends to release it on other platforms in an alleged Master Collection Vol. 2, now that the problem involving the number of disks no longer exists.

Via VGC