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A reference to SaveMGO, a community project focused on preserving the Metal Gear Online series through reverse-engineered servers, has been found within the executable of the recent Master Collection Volume 2 rerelease of Metal Gear Solid 4.
Metal Gear Online is an online third-person shooter series, which initially appeared in Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence on the PS2 and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops on the PSP, but was later revived for the PS3 as a spin-off for Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
Over the years, the official servers for these games were all shut down, with the Metal Gear Solid 4 iteration being taken offline in 2012. Since then, however, a group calling itself SaveMGO has brought these games back online, ensuring future generations can play them.
As revealed back in February of this year, the rerelease of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots doesn't feature Metal Gear Online mode, but that hasn't stopped SaveMGO being referenced in the new release, with SaveMGO's Marko AKA KDE Wayland 69 Enjoyer announcing the news yesterday on social media, in which he reacted to the news.
Writing on Twitter/X, Marko said of the discovery, "SaveMGO is officially canon. MGS4 in MC2 has strings referencing SaveMGO right inside the executable. The original DLC might only exist today because SaveMGO kept it available all these years. My reaction to the news is in the video. Feeling proud."
Exactly what this means is a bit of a mystery right now, as Konami has not publicly commented on this, but the prevailing theory is that Konami used SaveMGO to access some of the DLC content, which required an online connection.
In his video reaction, Marko responded to the news by saying, "That is awesome! So the only way they could get that stuff is potentially due to the preservation of SaveMGO. That is cool."
We reached out to SaveMGO to find out more.