An ongoing series of mash-ups for two of my favorite PS1 titles:
Metal Gear Solid and Ape Escape — starring my fursona as the self-insert player!

I've been a big viewer of speedruns for years now, and have been fascinated by the game-modding community and their projects. One type of modification that has grown from these two communities is the Game Randomizer: A tool that randomizes various aspects of a game, whether they be the player's stats, the placement of enemies and items, the order of levels and rooms, or even outright procedural generation.

Randomizers tend to attract players and speedrunners who are looking to maximize replayability in their favorite games. These randomized games routinely find their way into speedrunning events like Games Done Quick, or The GDQ Hotfix's every-other-Tuesday show, Random Number Generation.

But sometimes it's not enough to randomize one game. Sometimes, you need to randomize two games and mash them together. One such example of this is the Super Metroid and A Link to the Past Crossover Randomizer, which had made its appearance as a co-operative speedrun at Summer Games Done Quick 2019.

At the time of these images' original conception, I was daydreaming about games that could receive the randomizer treatment. Metal Gear Solid and Ape Escape were two such candidates, games that I love dearly and have replayed countless times.

Both feature large sprawling environments in which to litter enemies and pick-ups, and progression is gated by weapon or item requirements. The games' respective villains, Liquid Snake and Specter, carry themselves with a similar air of indignancy fueled by inferiority complexes — and both come with their own giant robot battles.

But there's another key detail that brings these two games together: Official crossovers. Metal Gear Solid 3 brought us the arcade minigame Snake vs. Monkey, while Ape Escape 3 delivered the stealth mission Mesal Gear Solid: Snake Escape.

And so here we are.

Randomize Metal Gear Solid. Randomize Ape Escape. And then combine them. Separate randomizers for both games would be large efforts, but to cross them over? An improbable feat for sure, one that I'd give anything to see.

Even if that means fulfilling my own wishes through the power of ✨ fan art ✨