Movie director John Carpenter recently sat down with the Hollywood Reporter to speak about his legal battle with lockout film writers. As part of the topic, the correlation between Escape from LA with Kurt Russell which Carpenter directed and the Metal Gear Solid game series came into discussion.
For those who are unaware, Kurt Russell plays a character named Snake in the film and wears an eye patch, which is identical to Kojima's character in MGS. Carpenter's studio CanalPlus wanted him to sue Kojima for the infraction, but Carpenter refused citing "But I told them not to do that. I know the director of those games, and he’s a nice guy, or at least he’s nice to me.”
This happens more than you'd think in video games with studios copying films' story lines and/or characters. After all, The Uncharted series by Naughty Dog is a ripoff of the Indian novel series The Jewel Thief. Studios take chances and sometimes they get caught sometimes they don't. Bottom line I guess is if the owner of the copyrighted info doesn't care then why should we, right?
Even still, with the references to Escape from New York, it would have been cool to see Snake in MGS V have to make a bunch of full court basketball shots or enter the "world code" like Russell did in the movie.
