Metal Gear Solid games in order, and where to start

For most of the last decade, playing Metal Gear in order meant keeping a PS3 plugged in. Metal Gear Solid 4 never left that console, and several of the older games were only sold in collections that had gone out of print. That changed on August 27, 2026, when Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 brought Metal Gear Solid 4 and Peace Walker to PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, Switch 2 and PC. Every mainline game in the series can now be bought on current hardware.

The short answer on where to start: play in release order, beginning with Metal Gear Solid (1998). The story jumps around in time, but each game was written for people who had played the ones before it, and the twists depend on that. If you only want to try one game to see whether the series is for you, play Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, the 2025 remake of the third game. It's first in the timeline, needs no background, and plays like a modern game.

Metal Gear games in order of release

These are the mainline games, with the two spin-offs people ask about most.

PS4 and Xbox One versions run on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, so Metal Gear Solid V plays fine on a current console.

Master Collection Vol. 1 (October 24, 2023) is on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch and PC. Vol. 2 is on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, Switch 2 and PC, and costs $49.99 on Steam. The games are also sold separately on some stores: on Steam, Metal Gear Solid is $19.99 and Metal Gear Solid 4 is $29.99 on their own.

Metal Gear chronological order: the story timeline

The story runs from the Cold War to a near future of private armies, and it follows two men. The prequels are about Naked Snake, later known as Big Boss. The games set later are about Solid Snake, the soldier sent to stop him.

Metal Gear Survive sits outside the main story in an alternate timeline, and you can ignore it.

Should you play Metal Gear in release order or chronological order?

Release order, and it isn't close.

The prequels were made later and they lean on what you already know. Snake Eater works fine cold, but its ending hits differently when you know what Big Boss becomes. The Phantom Pain's biggest reveal means very little unless you've played the 1987 original or at least know its plot. Metal Gear Solid 4 is a two-hour-cutscene farewell to characters from the three games before it, and played in timeline order you'd reach it with the Big Boss half fresh and the Solid Snake half only just introduced.

There's a practical reason too. Chronological order starts with the 2025 remake and then hands you a 2006 PSP game, a 2010 PSP game, a 2015 open-world game, and a pair of 1980s MSX games. The controls and design lurch decades back and forth. Release order lets the series grow up in front of you.

Here's the order we'd suggest.

1. Metal Gear Solid
2. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
3. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, or Delta
4. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
5. Peace Walker
6. Ground Zeroes, then The Phantom Pain
7. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, whenever you want a break

Do you need to play the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2?

No, though you should know they exist. The two MSX games are top-down stealth games from 1987 and 1990, and Metal Gear Solid summarizes their story in its menu. They're included in Master Collection Vol. 1, and Metal Gear 2 in particular is better than its age suggests: most of what people think Metal Gear Solid invented is already there. Play them if you get hooked. Skip them if you just want to get going.

Portable Ops is the one mainline-adjacent game you can't buy. It hasn't been re-released since the PSP and isn't in either collection. Peace Walker covers the same ground more successfully, and nothing later depends on it.

Which Metal Gear Solid should I play first?

Metal Gear Solid (1998), if you're in for the series. It's a 12-hour game that still does things most games don't, including one boss fight that people have been spoiling for each other for 28 years. The PlayStation-era controls take an hour to get used to. Push through it.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, if you want one game. Delta rebuilds the 2004 jungle spy story in a modern engine and keeps the script, voice performances and level layouts intact. It came out on August 28, 2025, sold more than two million copies by March 2026, and is $49.99 on Steam. Critics praised how it looks and plays, and many were divided on how closely it sticks to the original. For a newcomer, that faithfulness is a plus: you're getting the real thing with a modern camera. It's a good example of the kind of project we describe in why there are so many video game remakes.

The Phantom Pain, if you care about play more than plot. Metal Gear Solid V is one of the best stealth sandboxes ever made, it's $19.99 on Steam, and you can enjoy it knowing almost nothing. Its story is the thinnest and least finished in the series, so don't judge the writing by it. It's also enormous. If its map full of side operations starts to feel like a chore, our guide on playing an open world without clearing every icon applies.

Whichever you pick, start on Normal. These games reward getting caught and improvising, and the harder modes punish it. We go into that trade-off in how to choose a difficulty setting.

What's in Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 and Vol. 2?

These are preservation packages, not remasters. The games look and play much as they did, at higher resolutions. When we went through the reviews in our Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 roundup, Vol. 2 sat at 83 on OpenCritic, with critics glad to see Metal Gear Solid 4 off the PS3 and less sure about two main games for the price.

If you own both collections and Metal Gear Solid V, you have the whole mainline story except Portable Ops. On Switch and Switch 2 you can play everything through Peace Walker, but not Metal Gear Solid V or Delta.

Is there a new Metal Gear game coming?

Nothing has been announced. Series creator Hideo Kojima left Konami in 2015, and since then the company has released one new game, the 2018 spin-off Metal Gear Survive, plus the collections and Delta. Konami hasn't announced another remake or a Master Collection Vol. 3 at the time of writing. The series had sold 66.4 million copies by the end of June 2026, so it would be a surprise if Delta were the end of it, but there is no title or date to plan around.

That makes this a good time to play through. Nothing new is about to land, and for the first time since 2008 the whole thing is on one machine.

Eleven games, two timelines and at least three men called Snake make this an easy series to lose your place in. In Perthro, you can line the games up in the order you plan to play, log each one with its platform and hours when you finish, and leave yourself a note on what just happened in the plot before you start the next. Our game tracker page explains how that works across PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and Steam.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Metal Gear (franchise)
• Wikipedia: Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection
• Wikipedia: Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater
• Wikipedia: Metal Gear (1987 video game)
• Wikipedia: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
• Wikipedia: Metal Gear Solid (1998 video game)
• Wikipedia: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
• Wikipedia: Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops
• Wikipedia: Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
• Wikipedia: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
• Wikipedia: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
• Wikipedia: Backward-compatible games for Xbox One and Series X/S
• Steam: Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater
• Steam: Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2
• Steam: Metal Gear Solid, Master Collection Version
• Steam: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain