In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, FOX operative Jack, codename Naked Snake, is forced to do battle with his mentor--The Boss--after dealing with the game's "Metal Gear"(the Shagohod) and sadistic Russian lightning-boxer Colonel Volgin. After an insanely epic final duel (seriously one of the best boss fights ever), Snake kills the Boss and narrowly escapes nuclear oblivion with his partner EVA. This is why President Johnson bestows upon Snake the title of Big Boss. This fight to the death takes place in a stunningly beautiful field of white flowers. It's quite a sight: white flower petals delightfully dancing about as The Boss mercilessly breaks all of your bones and destroys all your guns. In fact, they kinda looked like this:
The same sort of petals show up in the trailer near the beginning as our main character reaches out to grasp them only to find a hook where his forearm used to be. So why is this important? Snake never got over killing his mentor. Her death was essentially designed by and planned by the US government to prove its innocence to the Russians after Volgin destroyed a Russian weapons design bureau with an American made nuclear warhead. It wasn't a deserved death: it was all a show. The Boss would go down in history as a despicable turncoat and her student would bask in all the glory. This never sat well with the new Big Boss and eventually caused him to rebel against the very notion of governments and nations: a point driven home by Peace Walker. Speaking of Volgin, he's definitely the most ruthless villain of the entire series. He launches a successful nuclear attack on his own nation to further his goals, he takes pleasure in torturing his enemies, and is a genuine sadist in the bedroom. Electricity courses through his body and he uses it to fire bullets he puts between his each of his fingers like brass knuckles. In short, this guy is a badass. He met his end at the hands of Big Boss in MGS3, but what if he didn't?
Could Volgin have survived? He was struck by a lightning bolt at the end of MGS3 which ignited his body and caused the bullet belt you see wrapped around him in the above photo to discharge all over him. This moment in the trailer could be written off as a hallucination, but the man helping the main character also seems to see him. Perhaps Volgin did survive the events of MGS3 and has had it out for Snake ever since. Perhaps he is commanding the force that's assaulting the hospital in the trailer and couldn't resist charging into the battle himself to get even with the man that nearly killed him and ruined his plans. The leg armor is nearly exactly the same. This doesn't seem like a coincidence. That pretty much covers the major hints towards previous Metal Gear Solid games in the trailer, but there's even more goodies out there for us to explore. How about our developer, Moby Dick Studios? It's headed up by CEO Joakim Mogren. Joakim is a legitimate Swedish name, but it's also an anagram of Kojima:
K-O-J-I-M-AJ-O-A-K-I-M Furthermore, the name Mogren contains the word "ogre" as in Project Ogre: something Kojima has been working on for awhile now
and is definitely not the next confirmed MGS game: Ground Zeroes. Also, what is an ogre? A giant monster, right? Maybe a giant whale? How about a famous giant whale named Moby Dick? Is this conspiratorial? Yes, but, if you take all of this together, I think it's got some real substance. Seems like a clear score for The Phantom Pain being both the next-next Metal Gear Solid game and Project Ogre. Kojima has wrapped up Solid Snake's story, but he's obviously not finished with Big Boss yet. Ground Zeroes continues the story of Peace Walker and serves as a
"prologue" to another game in the series (which is totally The Phantom Pain). Between MGS: Peace Walker and the original Metal Gear, there's a pretty large stretch of time: 21 years to be exact. In those 21 years, Snake has another run in with Frank Jaeger, mentors Sniper Wolf, and further cements his reputation as a legendary soldier. Ground Zeroes and MGS5 will undoubtedly tell these tales. Oh, and, if you're still not convinced by any of this, check out what those "phantom" letters in the logo spell out:
