"As far as a character that’s evolved with the hardware, that would have to be Snake. If you look at the original Metal Gear, he was a very silent type of character—-he didn’t speak much. Probably the reason for that is, on that hardware, we were unable to make the characters speak. You could compare it to movies. The original Metal Gears were kind of like silent-era movies and Metal Gear Solid 1 is when it became talkies and sound movies. But at the same time with Metal Gear Solid 1, he could speak but there still wasn’t emotion on the face. So everything had to be done through the voices. He had to say whether or not he liked something or if he was feeling hot or it hurt. Everything had to be explained vocally. Then we saw 2000, the next step in his evolution, where we could have emotion on his face. We get things like motion-capture and try to make games realistic and believable. That was the next stage in his evolution. For Metal Gear Solid 4, we were able to get more resolution and add more detail to the faces. We added wrinkles and we added the aspect of age to the equation. So: telling a story through wrinkles. If you really look at the evolution of Snake, the character, it’s also looking at the evolution of the gaming industry and hardware. I think that’s something that’s pretty unique to Snake as a character and you don’t see it in any other form of media where the character evolves with hardware."