There are people talking about Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance again, and not only that: they’re playing it too. A 2013 PlatinumGames hack-and-slash action game, it looks like Revengeance, almost 10 years old, lives up to its name, a set of revenge and revenge. Because if you look at a recent statistic published by the cross-platform data analytics group PlayTracker, which pointed out that the number of players simultaneously increased by 1000% since last April thanks to a particular meme, you think that the silver-haired robot Raiden will be back. with a … revenge.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, often abbreviated to Revengeance, was a strange collaboration between PlatinumGames action game fans and the developer of the Metal Gear Solid series Kojima Productions. Set canonically after the 2008 PS3-exclusive Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Revengeance followed the protagonist of MGS 2, Raiden, while stopping the singular plan of a U.S. senator to reduce the world to pure chaos by exploiting the global war economy. Let this crazy but prominent premise sink in for a moment. This is the whole plot of the game, and it totally rules! But what really made the game shine was its fluid, crunchy, hyper-aggressive combat, full of acrobatic kicks and bloody katana blows. Raiden is a cybernetic, after all, and PlatinumGames, creator of Bayonetta and Nier: Automata, really knows how to design combat mechanics that look poignant. Still, good play alone doesn’t explain the sudden resurgence, so what’s going on? Well, they are memes, “the DNA of the soul,” as the magnetic head Monsoon says during his frustrating and philosophical battle.
PlayTracker, a smaller independent team that watches and reports on player trends across platforms, tweeted on May 23 that Revengeance “is seeing numbers it hasn’t seen” since its release. In fact, according to the group, the game “exploded” in popularity in January 2022, reaching an average of 2,000 players a month, between 300 and 800 during 2021. A PlayerTracker spokesman exposed the numbers to Kotaku by direct messages from Twitter, saying it. these are two figures that are taken into account in the publication: the concurrent Steam players and the cross-platform achievement activity.
Although almost 10 years old, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is seeing numbers it hasn’t seen since its release.
📈 Concurrent players increased 1000% 🏆 Peak in achievement activity across all platforms
The cause? Several meme templates with game characters went viral. pic.twitter.com/Ey6FmYAXJp
– PlayTracker (@PlayTrackerNet) May 23, 2022
“For competing players, we get the number through Steam’s public API many times a day and track it over time,” a PlayerTracker spokesman said. “Anyone can access the current number of players at once. You can also independently verify our data on how this figure has moved over time on similar sites like SteamCharts and SteamDB. For cross-platform achievement activity , is the achievement activity of our 11.5 thousand registered users on Steam, PlayStation and Xbox.To clarify this is a total of 11.5 thousand registered users.Some have many platforms, others only one or two. Our site’s social media allows users to link their libraries and profiles in one place. “
As the PlayTracker spokesman said, this upward trend is also reflected in Steam. Ongoing trend analyzer SteamCharts reports that Revengeance saw a 61% increase in players around January. The game kept this growth rate steady even after a slight drop in March. I mean, at the time of writing, about 2,000 have been playing Revengeance in the last 24 hours.
And memes seem to be to blame for the resurgence of the game. Although Hideo Kojima did not write or direct Revengeance, he still has all the intensified melodrama of the series and some, and arrives full of characters chewing on wonderfully quotable (or memorable) sets and dialogues. Currently, some of the main posts from r / MetalGearSolid, the subreddit dedicated to all things Metal Gear, this month are some funny Revengeance memes. There’s the final boss in the game, the fictional American Senator Steven Armstrong, who has so many memorable moments: “Nanomachines, Son!” as an explanation for why he is so powerful in literally saying he wants to “make America great again”; this makes it easily the source of the game’s most memorable encounters.
But perhaps the game’s most prominent meme, and the one that has probably catapulted Revengeance back into the public eye, is “Jetstream Sam Thinking.” It’s nonsense, with lots of GIFs printed with a ridiculous statement – something like “I should sabotage a nuclear reactor” – and the sleek swordsman Samuel “Jetstream Sam” Rodrigues stroking his chin as if he were really considering the idea. Memes, man.
Some mentions of PlayTracker attribute the game’s recent popularity to youtuber Jacob Geller’s May 2 video essay examining Revengeance’s enduring (and growing) popularity. He makes several interesting arguments about why the game continues to attract new players, including its “incredibly aggressive” combat system in which dodging is an optional skill and stopping is tied to the attack button. Inspired by Geller’s video, I recently returned to Revengeance via Xbox backwards compatibility. I have a bigger blog going on about this, but just one mission in the game I was instantly reminded why Revengeance was so exciting in 2013. The action starts in 10 minutes, with you fighting one of the giants mechanized bearing the name of the series. then a giant Metal Gear, and he doesn’t let go until he’s finished his seven-hour campaign. Including additional DLC, allowing you to play as two more characters, and bringing your entire team between plays were bonuses.
It’s great to see Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance come back like this. PlayTracker agreed, saying its popularity is unlikely to end soon.
“Because memes are just gaining momentum and a few popular streamers [like VTuber Kyokeru and YouTuber karlswood] they are ready to play the game live, it can be said that it will maintain its momentum a little more “.