Rumors about new Metal Gear games from Konami are swirling, and while we don’t know how those will pan out, we always have previous games in the series. The last time Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance made headlines was when it came to Xbox Games with Gold in 2019. Here we are three years later, and it’s seeing a massive spike in players. You can thank memes for that.
PlayTracker, which monitors video game stats across multiple platforms, tweeted the news. Despite releasing nearly a decade ago, the game “is seeing numbers it hasn’t seen since launch.” Specifically, the concurrent player count is up a whopping 1,000%. It averaged between 300 and 500 people throughout 2021, but this year it rose to an average of 2,000, reaching a new “peak in achievement activity across all platforms.” For reference, the game was first available on PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 in February 2013. Today, backward compatibility makes it playable on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, while PlayStation Now can stream the game to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
As PlayTracker explains, the cause of this sudden growth in concurrent players is thanks to “various meme templates featuring characters from the game [that] went viral.” Jetstream Sam Thinking is cited as a specific meme example. The template features the boss making a pondering face, which is certainly ripe for meme-making. Senator Steven Armstrong and his nanomachines have also been a good source of laughs. Sam, Senator Armstrong, and other characters have certainly drawn in a lot of players.
The mainline Metal Gear Solid games have been in the news over the last few months too, largely due to Konami’s digital delisting of several titles. That led to Metal Gear Solid 3D (the 3DS version of Snake Eater) skyrocketing in value this spring. Meanwhile, rumors about a full-on remake of Snake Eater from Virtuos continue to circulate.
