For those who have played the “Metal Gear Solid” games and seen “Escape From New York,” the connections between Snake Plissken and Solid Snake are readily apparent. From the character’s penchant for smoking cigarettes to his recurring distrust of government representatives and authority figures, there’s a lot of Snake in … erm, Snake. For instance, when Solid Snake is undercover in “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty,” he even uses Plissken as his codename.
As if facts like these don’t make it obvious enough, Naked Snake, another series protagonist, would later become Big Boss, and the character even wears an eyepatch. Ditto for Solid Snake himself by the time “Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots” came along. Add in the signature gravelly voice and cocky attitude, and it becomes pretty clear that there are major connections between the characters.
While Hideo Kojima was never quite able to wrangle Russell to voice the character, he did eventually land Kiefer Sutherland to be the motion capture performer and voice actor for Venom Snake in “Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain” and its predecessor “Ground Zeroes.”
