Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns Of The Patriots was originally released for the PS3 in 2008, but it could have launched for the Xbox 360 as well. According to the game’s assistant producer Ryan Payton (from Steven L Kent’s book The Ultimate History of Video Games Vol. 2 via Time Extension), the game was actually “running beautifully and smoothly” on Xbox 360 at one point during development.

Payton also claims that there was no exclusivity deal to ensure the game was only released on PS3, but that the reason why Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns Of The Patriots was never released for the Xbox 360 came down to the choice of disc format used in Microsoft‘s console.

Payton said:

“Despite how downtrodden my colleagues were with developing on PS3, most of them were still hardcore Sony fans and were not in favour of spending resources on such a test. They believed Metal Gear Solid 4 would look and run terribly on Microsoft’s older and inferior hardware.

One fateful day, the Konami R&D team hosted a meeting where we got to see the fruits of their labour – Metal Gear Solid 4 running beautifully and smoothly on an Xbox 360.”

However, while the port was possible on a technical level, it wasn’t practical on a physical level. PS3 games were stored on Blu-Ray discs which could hold up to 54GB of storage. Unfortunately, Xbox 360 games were stored on DVD-ROM discs which could only hold up to 8.3GB. What this means is that the Xbox 360 version would have had to come with multiple discs.

Last month during Summer Game Fest 2023, Konami announced a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3, titled Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater, as well as a Metal Gear Solid Master Collection series. Volume 1 will contain Metal Gear Solid 1 to 3 as well as the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2.

To date, Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns Of The Patriots has never been re-released in any other format, which means that it remains a PS3 exclusive even now in 2023. There’s still no other way to play the game.