Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1504072-20130423225415/@comment-1672596-20130508120258

SirOnion wrote: Peacewalker was created to essentially replace Portable Ops in every way. I'm not saying this was a good decision, but I think we all know Kojima's thoughts on the process: "San Hierymino crap". Hideo's made it impossible for both games to coexist so he chose Peacewalker. Fine by me, but I'm not saying PO wasn't a good game.

No, actually, if Kojima wanted to disown MPO or had hated it, he would have done so publicly, explicitly, and without any ambiguity on the matter. Think how he treated the NES version of Metal Gear, for example: He constantly treats it like dirt, makes it blatant in pretty much every interview how he hated that game, not even caring if he offended the people who made the game in the first place. And for the record, Portable Ops wasn't "replaced" by Peace Walker, as they still had a good three to four year difference in terms of plot. If he wanted to replace it with PW, the very FIRST thing he would have done is make sure that they both occurred at exactly the same date (ie, Peace Walker taking place in November 1, 1970, not November 4, 1974). That's what he did with Snake's Revenge and Metal Gear 2 (which probably explains why they constantly referred to the date in-game as being three years after Metal Gear despite other sources, including the manual, stating that it was four years afterwards). Besides, even Kojima stated that Portable Ops occurred canonically in a podcast released shortly after Peace Walker's release, and at least until the official site took down the saga interactive timeline itself, it still retained Portable Ops as part of the timeline.