Hunt For A Missing Ghost In Metal Gear Solid 1’s Secret Spooky Mini-Game

I’ve prattled on plenty about the various ways you can spook yourself this Christmas, from playing one of Supermassive’s polished interactive horror-drama thingies with a loved one, to trawling through the bowels of gaming history and checking out Clive Barker’s forgotten first foray into videogames. Or you can just face the darkness in Alan Wake 2, which is a way more spooky horror game than the original.

But there’s a certain charm to finding the horror in a non-horror game, and one of the more legendary means of doing this comes when you get the camera in the original Metal Gear Solid (which many of you may well be on the way to doing in the freshly released Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 1).

The camera unlocks a ghost-hunting mini-game, where you can take photos in various locations, revealing the spectral figures of the game’s developers (yep, including Hideo Kojima). Once you take the pictures, you can spot the ghosts by opening the photos up from the game menu, at which point you’ll get the option to ‘Exorcise’ them, sending them to the great beyond for good.

It kind of feels like a precursor to the excellent Fatal Frame games, where a big part of the game involves you taking pictures of areas where ghosts then fade into view on the camera. I genuinely wonder if the guys at Koei Tecmo took some inspiration from this when conceiving their immensely creepy ghost photography series. It’s super-cool, and while some of the spooky images are just translucent photos of the devs looking all smiley and normal, some are a little more eerie, as the devs appear with distorted faces, in bizarre postures, and, in one case, a cat mask.

The Master Collection has wisely added an Achievement for your ghost-hunting exploits, and you’ll get the ‘Ghostly Encounter’ Achievement once you exorcise your first ghost.

To snap ghosts, you’ll need a camera, and there are two ways to get this in Metal Gear Solid 1:

1. Upon completing the game, save the game (making sure to overwrite the file you were using for the game). When you load the completed game, you’ll start a new game with either the stealth camo or bandana (depending on whether you withstood the torture sequence or not), as well as a shiny new camera.
2. Alternatively, you can get the camera on your first run-through, though it’ll be quite late in the game so you probably won’t be able to photograph all the ghosts on that run. Once you gain a Level 5 Keycard, head back to Tank Hangar B2, then in the arena where you fought Ocelot take the south-western corridor out of there.
   • There’ll be an opening on the right-side wall from where you blew a hole in it earlier in the game. Go through here, blow up the wall at the far end, then use a Chaff Grenade to disable the camera in the next corridor.
   • Run up the vertical corridor to the door at the north-eastern corner, unlock it using your Lvl. 5 Keycard, and the camera is in there.

The Hunt for the Missing Ghost

Once you have the camera, you can go about tracking down the 42 (or even 43, as you’ll soon discover) ghosts hidden throughout Metal Gear Solid. They’re in quite specific locations, and unfortunately you won’t get hints as to where they are, so you’ll need to figure that out yourself (or use this ancient blog post on Hardcore Gaming 101, which has archived pictures of all but one of the game’s ghosts from a defunct Chinese forum).

That does beg the question though: what’s up with the missing ghost? Gets those spook sensors going, doesn’t it? Missing people are spooky, ghosts are spooky, but missing ghosts? It’s like a frickin’ spook-ception—spooks within spooks.

Well, according to the original Chinese forum poster (via Hardcore Gaming 101), the missing ghost is that of translator Jeremy Blaustein, who was apparently in the game files, but not in the game itself. The poster speculated that this was because of limited capacity on the PS1 memory card, while others have suggested that he had some kind of feud with the game’s creator Hideo Kojima, but the reality is a little more complicated than that.

Because it transpires that Blaustein’s ghost does exist in Metal Gear Solid 1, but only in certain versions of it. Youtuber Allison Muller tested this out in the video below.

Muller found that Blaustein’s ghost exists in the NTSC and PAL versions of the game, not the Japanese one, while Motosada Mori features only in the NTSC and Japanese versions of the game. So ultimately the PAL and Japanese versions have 42 ghosts, while the NTSC version has all 43.

So how about it? Fancy a little ghost-hunting in one of the greatest non-ghost games of all time? The Metal Gear Solid Master Collection may not be perfect, but it’s still a great probably the best way to play these classics, and a great excuse to go through them again. Happy huntin’.