This document records the principal figures of the Cold War and Patriot eras and their accomplishments, as they stand in the history of the world in autumn 2015. It covers historically-relevant people and what they did.
The Boss was the most decorated soldier of her age and is remembered as the Mother of Special Forces. In 1942 she formed the Cobra Unit, a squad of exceptional soldiers that fought through the Second World War and became legendary. She invented and taught the close-quarters combat system later known as CQC, and she trained the soldiers who went on to found modern special operations, most notably her protégé, Naked Snake.
In 1964 she appeared to defect to the Soviet Union, handing the rogue colonel Volgin a pair of American nuclear warheads. The defection was staged. She had been sent to recover the Philosophers' Legacy, a fortune held in hidden accounts, and was ordered to die for the cover story. Snake killed her at the end of Operation Snake Eater, and the official record named her a traitor. Her death became the founding wound of the Patriots, and her dying wishes drove the history of the following half-century.
Status: Deceased (1964).
Major Zero began his career in British commando service during the Second World War, joined the intelligence community and rose to command the CIA's FOX unit, which he formed with the Boss in 1964. After the Boss's death he took control of the Philosophers' Legacy. With it, he created Cipher, the organisation that later became the Patriots.
Zero's aim was to carry out what he understood to be the Boss's wish, a unified world held together by control of information and intelligence. He recruited Big Boss, Ocelot, EVA, Para-Medic and Sigint as the founding group, commissioned the Les Enfants Terribles cloning project, and commanded FOXHOUND through the 1970s. In 1975 the leader of his own covert unit XOF, Skull Face, poisoned him with a parasite weapon. He survived in a vegetative state, kept alive on life support while the Patriots' network of AIs took over his work.
Status: Deceased (2014).
Big Boss is the most important soldier in the modern history of war and the centre of every account that follows. He was born in 1935 and served in the Green Berets before FOX recruited him. His codename in the field was Naked Snake. In 1964, under Zero's command and the Boss's supervision, he completed the Virtuous Mission by rescuing the Soviet scientist Sokolov, then carried out Operation Snake Eater: he destroyed the Shagohod weapon, eliminated Volgin and the Cobra Unit, and killed the Boss. For this he received the honorific 'Big Boss'.
In 1970 he ended the FOX revolt at San Hieronymo in Central America, and joined Zero's new organisation as its inspirational figurehead. By the early 1970s he had left, disillusioned by Zero's methods, and founded the mercenary army 'Militaires Sans Frontières' with Kazuhira Miller. The following year Cipher's strike force: XOF, destroyed MSF in a surprise assault on their mother-base.
The record of the 1980s attributes to him the founding of the 'Diamond Dogs', an army that wiped out XOF and killed Skull Face in 1984.
In the 1990s he built 'Outer Heaven', a nation of soldiers in southern Africa, where the soldier owed no loyalty to any state or contract. The new FOXHOUND recruit Solid Snake destroyed it in 1995.
In 1999 he rebuilt it as 'Zanzibar Land' in Central Asia in 1999, and Snake defeated him again. The Patriots recovered his body and kept him alive.
His genes produced three clones: Solid Snake, Liquid Snake and Solidus Snake. His name, face and reputation fuelled every private army, mercenary legend and insurgent movement of the next decades. By 2014 he had spent years in the Patriots' custody, and he awoke that year to find the organisation he had helped found turned into a machine he despised. He met Solid Snake at the graves of the Boss and himself, ended Zero's life, and died of the mutated FOXDIE that Snake carried.
Status: Deceased (2014).
EVA, known later as Big Mama, was a Chinese-born spy who accompanied Naked Snake through Operation Snake Eater as his transport and sometime lover. She was one of the six founding members of the Patriots. In later decades she became the caretaker of Big Boss's remains and the keeper of his legend.
Status: Deceased (2014).
Skull Face was the commander of XOF, Zero's covert support unit, and he followed Naked Snake through Operation Snake Eater, cleaning up after him. In the 1970s he poisoned Zero, took control of XOF, and prepared a counter-plan built around 'Vocal Cord Parasites', a living weapon intended to kill speakers of a target language.
Status: Deceased (1984).
Ocelot began as Major Adamska, a GRU officer, and appeared in 1964 as a young and ambitious Soviet agent who fought and later helped Snake. He became Zero's agent, then a Patriot, then a double and triple agent whose real loyalties were rarely clear. He staged the Shadow Moses and Big Shell crises, controlled much of the Patriots' covert operations, and in 2014 returned as 'Liquid Ocelot' to break the AI network and rule the war economy himself. He died fighting Solid Snake on Outer Haven.
Status: Deceased (2014).
Kaz Miller was Big Boss's second-in-command and the organising mind of MSF. A skilled negotiator and administrator, he turned a band of mercenaries into a functioning private military company with its own base, supply lines and contracts.
Status: Deceased (2005).
Huey Emmerich was a roboticist born without the use of his legs who spent his life in a wheelchair. He built the frames and AI pods of the Peace Walker weapon system for the CIA's Peace Sentinel project, then defected to MSF when he learned that it would carry live nuclear missiles. He designed Metal Gear ZEKE, the first bipedal nuclear-armed walker, and later the prototype Sahelanthropus. His work established the Metal Gear lineage that his son Hal inherited. He later betrayed MSF to Cipher, and eventually took his own life.
Status: Deceased (1997).
Dr. Strangelove was an AI researcher recruited into the Peace Walker project, where she built the AI that governed the weapon. She worked with Huey on ZEKE, and she gave birth to their son Hal. In 1984 Huey locked her inside an AI pod, and she died there.
Status: Deceased (1984).
Hal Emmerich, known as Otacon, is Huey's and Strangelove's son. Raised in the United States, he became a prodigy in robotics and an anime enthusiast, and he took his nickname from the Otaku Convention. He designed Metal Gear REX for ArmsTech and DARPA, the first walking nuclear battle platform, and his guilt over its use at Shadow Moses in 2005 turned him into an opponent of Metal Gear technology. He met Solid Snake there and left the defence industry with him. Together they founded Philanthropy, a small anti-Metal Gear organisation. Otacon designed the support robot Metal Gear Mk. II and helped Snake through Tanker, Big Shell and the 2014 mission. He took in Sunny, Olga Gurlukovich's daughter, and raised her. He now cares for Snake in the Zone.
Status: Alive. Philanthropy's leader.