Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

https://www.thegamer.com/mgs2-hd-edition-source-code-massive-leak/

by rishabhd • 3 months ago

317 107 3 months ago

I wonder if it’s a real leak or just an agent recreation of the source from machine code.

I’ve been having fun lately with agents and decompilation. You can literally point them at any game and ask them to decompile the game and structure and format as if it was the original source code. Asking them to ensure it compiles works fine.

Some proof: i made online save game editors for jagged alliance 3; grandcheaten.com and news tower; thedailycheat.com (.com domains are only $10 so i figured why not).

You can do this with any game i’ve found. Older games work best due to the forced simplicity of the source code though.

bigyabai• 3 months ago

It's (probably) a real leak. There are original comments in Japanese describing cut content and game logic that was scrapped in the final release.

jayd16• 3 months ago

Raw assets are probably the better tell

whywhywhywhy• 3 months ago

It’s the real code there is code for known removed content (tanker escape scene and the 9/11 removed cutscene). Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet.

and ask them to decompile the game and structure and format as if it was the original source code. Asking them to ensure it compiles works fine

lot of people claiming this the end result is the AI downloading an emulator and rom

AnotherGoodName4• 3 months ago

Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet.

Did you try the above links? I haven’t shared the full source but all game mechanics listed in the ja3 guide including code snippets where helpful.

echelon• 3 months ago

It’s the real code there is code for known removed content (tanker escape scene and the 9/11 removed cutscene). Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet.

There are lots of decompilation community efforts for N64 games, etc.

Someone should train a model on this. Giving the decompiled symbols good names, etc.

De-minification and de-obfuscation while we're at it.

It should be easy to generate a ton of "synthetic" (actually real) training data for this by simply compiling sources and using that as (input, output) pairs.

tuna74• 3 months ago

How do you verify that everything is correct?

AnotherGoodName4• 3 months ago

I’m sure the builds from doing what i’ve been doing won’t generate identical bytecode but it’s fun for the sake of messing with the game or understanding it (eg. The checksum logic for newstowers save game logic was cooy pastable as was the whole save game structure formatting itself and clearly matches the game - it works!). Likewise with all the JA3 mechanics documented in that linked guide.

defen• 3 months ago

Whoa, since when is there a Jagged Alliance 3? Is it any good? JA2 is one of my favorite games of all time

AnotherGoodName4• 3 months ago

It’s playable but nowhere near as good and a lot of criticism is warranted. A true ‘70%’ game.

Gunplay is weak. Accuracy drops off waaaay too fast based on maximum range of the gun and burst fire has arbitrary damage reduction per bullet. So short range guns almost always missed (mechanics documented from source in the above guide) and if they hit they did little damage. It means the only viable weapons are long range weapons. Rifles and assault rifles. A submachine gun is worse than a sniper rifle even at close range.

The plot has a key gameplay changing moment that triggers waaay to early meaning you have to work to see much of the game content. Everyone tries to avoid the trigger on the second playthrough which is a silly thing to do game design wise. A desire to teleport across the map was the original motivation to the above from my point of view.

Enemies are bullet sponges in the late game too. A lame way o balance weak ai and gunplay.

It could have been as good as ja2 but they just didn’t refine the above enough.

jamesu2• 3 months ago

There is no way you could recreate a convincing enough 90s era codebase of a japanese videogame + its associated tools + scripts and commented out codepaths with current ai tools.

sigmoid105• 3 months ago

I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation of Twilight Princess jumped from very little to basically 100% of core code in the past year alone: https://github.com/zeldaret/tp

I have no doubt that this would be possible for MGS2 as well.

CamperBob22• 3 months ago

That's pre-2026 thinking. At this point, with the ability to lash IDA or similar tools to an agentic harness, there is no longer any such thing as a closed-source binary.

diath2• 3 months ago

Absolutely. This is just some delusions of a vibe coder at best. Not with just current generation of AI tools but essentially never. The conversion from C, C++, Rust or whatever, through post-processing (macros etc), through IR generation, through compile time optimizations, through link time optimizations, to the generated machine code is a one way street for low level languages. You can get a pretty close higher level approximation that matches the flow/logic/structure - but the code will never be anywhere near close to the original source code. I could write the same C++ program in 3 different ways and get identical assembly, how do you go back to the exact source? The answer is that you don't.

Here's the same simple program, written in 3 different ways, producing identical binary compatible code: https://godbolt.org/z/qWrc8fEnn

How does the AI know whether it should produce back the snippet #1, #2 or #3? It does not. It cannot.

red-iron-pine4• 3 months ago

if this leak is real... you probably could now. and as others have mentioned, similar code has been leaked before.

SSLy• 3 months ago

check for console headers. those aren't that easy to get out of LLMs

soraminazuki• 3 months ago

There's so much irony in hyping up a machine that launders other people's work, and the way that's done is also giving it credit for other people's work that it had nothing to do with. You can't make this up.

tombert5• 3 months ago

Maybe with the source code, I'd be able to figure out what the hell happened in the last ~2 hours of the game.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 months ago

Dunkey MGS Explained https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaLiLRVeaZA

halflife3• 3 months ago

That’s great, now do kingdom hearts

twic• 3 months ago

What? He completely misses Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Luckily that's pretty straightforward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41v3L0zCkNY

jwitthuhn• 3 months ago

I need scissors, 61!

cosmicgadget• 3 months ago

Must have been having a stroke...

EA-3167• 3 months ago

Kojima saw the writing on the wall so speak, and told us what the future held in a series of metaphors and dense monologues.

casualscience2• 3 months ago

Not much, just accurately predicted the next 30 years exactly

lxgr• 3 months ago

Including the cardboard boxes: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-ai-paul-scharre/

tombert5• 3 months ago

Everyone focuses on that part, but what the hell was with the girl that could repel bullets but it turns out that it was magnets but actually maybe she does have powers? And what about the weird thing where you start sword fighting your father/president/clone?

Yeah I know, sure, fake information on the internet. It's so prescient I guess, but the actual story is incomprehensible.

Lammy• 3 months ago

I wonder how they must have felt to have coded a 9/11 scenario of Arsenal Gear crashing into the Twin Towers, and then watched it actually happen a few months later.

This was cut from the game but is still in the source code leak, just commented out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNSPx-oRV60

Also note that the source code was leaked on April 30th :p

vor_• 3 months ago

Surveillance states and mass media manipulation are a staple of sci-fi. Those topics were particularly common around that time too. E.g., The Matrix.

networked2• 3 months ago

Try the classic analyses: https://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/MGS2/ and https://www.aumaan.org/form1/tus1/features/dreaming1.htm.

boricj2• 3 months ago

My favorite tidbit of the series (but it's in Metal Gear Solid 3): in the torture scene where Volgin interrogates Snake in an attempt to discover who is the spy in his ranks, of all the persons present in the room (and if I got everything right from memory):

- Volgin is not an agent

- Snake is an agent (USA spy)

- The Boss is a double agent (Soviet/USA spy)

- Eva is a triple agent (USA/Soviet/Chinese spy)

- Ocelot is a quadruple agent (GRU/KGB/CIA/Philosophers spy)

And of course, after that Volgin then kills Granin thinking he was the spy, but he wasn't.

stavros3• 3 months ago

What did actually happen? I haven't played the game.

jbreckmckye2• 3 months ago

During the mainline of the game you are an anti terrorist specialist sent to rescue the president from a bunch of stereotypical mad bombers

Well, basically, the leader of the terrorists is the 43rd US president, who is a clone of a super soldier despite being ostensibly anti cloning in office. (Yes, he's Dubya). He's planning to detonate a nuclear weapon above Manhattan so an EMP field knocks out all communications. The reason being that the government has been taken over by a conspiracy called the Patriots who are using a sinister AI to filter all internet traffic

However Dubya has been double crossed by an old Russian guy who was infatuated with the super soldier Dubya was cloned from. He claims to be representing the Patriots but suddenly his arm comes to life, claiming to be Dubya's brother. Oh, by the way, he lost his arm and got a transplant from the body of the other clone, Dubya's brother. It's implied in this game to be a supernatural occurrence.

Ghost Dubya 2 (in the body of elderly Spetznaz guy) goes on a rampage and tries to kill everyone. Dubya and the anti terrorist specialist end up fighting on top of Federal Hall, which if you've ever been to Manhattan is just next to the NYSE and TJ Maxx.

When you're there the Patriots phone you and they claim to be dead. Well, not dead exactly. They claim that in the same way life emerged from organic chemicals, life has emerged from the neural net of ideology and content published on the internet. Kind of like if ChatGPT became a bit uppity. They claim that Western Civilization is too corrupt and contradictory to be left in the hands of humans. You have to kill Dubya who is somewhat of an anti hero and it's kind of sad

Eventually another brother of Dubya who is kind of the hero does some digging, and his bromance partner discovers that the Patriots were real people but they all died 100 years ago. Also they were funding the real heroes all along!

It makes a lot more sense in MGS4

matheusmoreira3• 3 months ago

Kojima knew that everyone had played MGS1 and were highly anticipating the sequel, so he deliberately trolled them all by baiting their expectations then subverting every single one by doing the opposite of what people wanted him to do. And he also spawned a lot of AI memes along the way.

sb057• 3 months ago

https://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/MGS2/DOTM_TOC.htm

e12e2• 3 months ago

Thread:

https://boards.4chan.org/vr/thread/12541637/metal-gear-solid...

The re-constructed URL:

https://pixeldrain.com/l/aPyoCBax

jdw64• 3 months ago

very thanks!

bean469• 3 months ago

Mirror from the thread in case the Pixeldrain link does not work: https://gofile.io/d/Jf1tX8

ackenew• 3 months ago

Thread archive:

https://desuarchive.org/vr/thread/12541637

e12e2• 3 months ago

Alt download link from thread:

https://buzzheavier.com/i1f03py9rw4g

raouldukelives3• 2 months ago

Thank you so much.. you have no idea how hard it was to find these links not even 2 weeks later. THANK YOU!!!

NotPractical• 3 months ago

Minecraft Legacy Console Edition apparently leaked on 4chan recently, too: https://github.com/MCLCE/MinecraftConsoles

Almost no coverage on HN or mainstream media though. Surprising, considering the popularity of this game.

bombcar2• 3 months ago

Trying to explain why a Minecraft Legacy leak is worth anything when we have decompiled Java takes too long.

red-iron-pine4• 3 months ago

i'll bite: explain

OptionOfT• 3 months ago

Now do Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge!

HerbManic• 3 months ago

Being the Vita/360 versions makes this much more usable. I would be having a little panic attack if I had to go back to working on PS2 only code. I mean you came to like the thing but I'm convinced it was a form of digital Stockholm syndrome.

boricj2• 3 months ago

I've only played the original PlayStation 2 release, but wasn't the PS2 release of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance the version with the most content? I'd take a leak of that one over the other versions.

butlike2• 3 months ago

I think what they're saying is the PS2 was notoriously hard to program for.

raouldukelives3• 2 months ago

I think the only extra feature it has is the skating mini game. Now the og release of MGS2 US was interesting for the differences it has compared to even the JP release. US came first and is almost a kind of beta version.

david_mchale• 3 months ago

Good thing they had a 25 year head start on bringing MGS2 to market.

jbreckmckye2• 3 months ago

There are a couple of aspects of the MGS games that have already been discovered - this leak will help expand a lot of details

We know from reverse engineering efforts, and accounts by developers on the PC port, that all of the mainline MGS games used a proprietary scripting system called GCX. This was effectively a Konami fork of TCL - see eg https://github.com/Jayveer/Gcx

Konami built a custom lighting format for at least MGS3 called LA2, and a proprietary audio format called SDT. So far these haven't been reverse engineered - the leak will definitely open up progress there.

throwatdem12311• 3 months ago

The most important videogame ever made.

asimovDev• 3 months ago

Is it buildable for consoles? I assume it doesn't include the official SDKs for PS Vita and such?

Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

Related Stories