9 Times Video Games Eerily Predicted The Future‏

2. Solid Snake, The Original Edward Snowden

If you want to be pedantic about it, it's actually Raiden that this happens to. But nobody likes Raiden, even though it's his portion of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty that has the closest ties to later, real-life events. Like Tom Clancy, Metal Gear director Hideo Kojima is a crazy fan of politics, war and military advances, meaning that the games are as filled with actual developments in society and technology as much as they are with a guy hiding from genetically-enhanced super soldiers in a cardboard box. Perhaps the most startling prediction Kojima has made and seen come true was the parallels between the plot of Sons of Liberty and the recent revelations of NSA spying on civilians, leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden. In fact, the game began by riffing on the rumblings of the Patriot Act which, in a post-9/11 US, would place its citizens under greater and greater surveillance by the state. Metal Gear Solid 2's climactic twist does go a little overboard with regards to its shadowy government dealings (the human genome getting mapped and cloned, and all that), but it also introduced the Selection for Societal Sanity program, whose description sounds exactly like the NSA's PRISM system, which monitored the online comings and goings of...everyone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtfIjI1da3k
 
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Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/