Board Thread:Metal Gear Solid V/@comment-25277765-20140831060343/@comment-64.33.250.214-20140831103835

Bluerock wrote: Solid Snake has blue eyes in MG1, MG2, MGS4. I only think they were "green" in MGS2, but I'm not sure. Eye color also changes appearance with lighting conditions, so that's something to consider. It's possible Big Boss's single eye in MGS4 is not his own, given that his body was rebuilt (maybe not Solidus's or Liquid's, but that's speculation). Another consideration is that they gave a lighter eye color to young Big Boss because he was a "good guy", and made them darker as he became a "bad guy," from a character design perspective (I think I read something about this somewhere, but can't recall exactly where at the moment). It's true that eye color can change under certain light conditions in real life, but the lighting effects in earlier games wouldn't take that into account. From all the images I've seen of MGS2, Solid Snake's eyes appear green. Campbell says in the briefing of MGS1 that, besides skin tone, Solid is identical to Liquid. Liquid has green eyes. Then Twin Snakes came around, making some questionable changes to the PS1 version of the game.

Before Twin Snakes, we could tell by the original briefing scenes that Solid's hair was blonde. There's early concept art for MGS2 of Solid as Pliskin which clearly shows blonde hair. For whatever reason they changed it to light brown. Supposedly the new look didn't test well, or there were just too many blondes already. Pliskin's light brown hair clashes with his darker hair in MGS1.

Kojima apparently didn't think there'd be a game beyond MGS1, so these details hadn't been set in stone.