Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6747658-20130401084750/@comment-4913740-20130422143816

Valkyrie - Old Boy is an obscure character, a member of Dead Cell who was killed during the liquidation prior to the Big Shell Incident. He is never fully mentioned in the story but he is referenced and he was part of Kojima's original plan for MGS2.

The bit after the MGS2 credits was about the information Otacon obtained from the MO Disc. According to the information parameters that it was programmed to delete from GW, the Patriots had been dead for over 100 years. In MGS4, Old Snake calls bullshit on it, saying it was phoney information.

This idea of Old Boy being the XOF Commander is brilliant. As an earlier user stated, "Kojima also stated that he was bringing a character back from the dead for Metal Gear Solid 5. Old Boy is a dead character, both canonically and in terms of production."

This sounds like exactly the sort of thing Kojima would do. Now everybody is saying that Old Boy couldn't be 100 years old at the time of Ground Zeroes, but I think that Old Boy aged to such a point where it was no longer worth keeping track of how old he was, as it wasn't any difference anyway, so that around the time of Dead Cell, he would just be 'around 100 years old'.

Besides that idea, my other theory is that Old Boy was never fully established as a character in the MGS canon. So his history is fully open to change.