TheGamer Originals
Ground Zeroes Wasn’t Just A Glorified Demo, It’s One Of The Best Metal Gear Solid Games Ever Made
At the southern edge of Cuba, along a rocky, rain-battered coastline, lies Camp Omega. In this grim US-run prison camp, detainees are beaten, humiliated, and brutally interrogated. They wear anonymous orange jumpsuits and have sacks pulled over their heads. Rats scurry between the bars of their cages. Invasive spotlights roam back and forth. It’s a stunningly bleak setting for a video game, and an obvious parallel to Guantanamo Bay—which, eight years after Ground Zeroes was released, is still operating thanks to an executive order signed by Donald Trump. Despite Hideo Kojima and Yoji Shinkawa’s fetishism for military hardware and weaponry, Metal Gear has always been strongly anti-war—and Camp Omega is the series’ most overt, provocative manifestation of that.
