There's been a lot of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots coverage in the wake of the game's spectacular and dominant Tokyo Game Show appearance last month. We were particularly impressed by both the 1UP Yours podcast, which featured Kojima Productions' own Ryan Payton explaining various aspects of the games features and development; and MTV News Multiplayer's Q&A with the same Payton about the philosophy between the various trailers (nine, at last count) that the studio has released for MGS4. But the most intriguing piece of all was a seemingly unrelated story by a contributor to the Web site Ain't It Cool News who won an EBay auction for a previously unpublished and rejected draft of a script for the 1996 movie "Escape From L.A." from the screenplay's author, Coleman Luck.

Why is this interesting? Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima has never hidden the fact that his game's hero, Solid Snake, was inspired by Snake Plissken, the hero played by Kurt Russell in John Carpenter's 1981 movie "Escape From New York." In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Kojima made the connection explicit by having the believed-to-be-dead Solid Snake give his name as "Plissken" to MGS2's second player character, Raiden. And in 2003, Namco announced that it had struck a deal with Carpenter and Russell to bring the comic book series "John Carpenter's The Snake Plissken Chronicles" to life as a videogame for holiday 2005. (The game, alas, is presumed dead, as Namco has never shown any playable code.) But like the twin strands of a double helix, the Ain't It Cool News story reveals that there may have been more connections between the two franchises--spiritually speaking--than we originally believed.

In the AICN post, contributor "RaulMonkey" uses an FAQ format to summarize the events of writer Coleman Luck's "Escape From L.A." screenplay, which was written as a prequel, not a sequel, as was the film that was ultimately released to theaters. After being dropped into L.A., Plissken runs into a series of soldiers from his former army unit, "Black Light," all of whom were believed to have been killed, and each of whom has been physically transformed by the horrors of war. RaulMonkey describes Plissken's first major opponent, Drummond, as follows:

Two things are weird about Drummond: he has a robotic lower jaw and voice box, and he's supposed to be DEAD--Snake remembers burying him in Leningrad.

What's the deal with that?

We don't find out right away, but Drummond is one tough motherf---er to kill. He has his face slashed up with glass and suffers a three-storey fall, then takes four rounds to the chest before finally succumbing.

Sounds a bit like a Metal Gear Solid-style boss character, right? We thought so too. Now check out RaulMonkey's recap of Plissken's encounters with the rest of his old unit:

You mentioned Snake's "old army buddy" Drummond. Do we get to learn more about Snake's past?

In a matter of speaking. Drummond isn't the only supposedly dead member of Snake's "Black-light" Army Unit that he runs into on L.A.

He is also rescued from the cops by one Johnny Lorder, whose heart was cut out by Russian peasants and rode over with a tractor--he now has a garish purple lump beating on the front of his chest--and after being imprisoned by cultists, he runs into Dargan, who was cut in half by a Russian machine gun while hiding in a pool, and now has the ability to hold his breath underwater for upwards of ten minutes....

Drummond wanted to kill Snake. Are Lorder and Dargan nicer to him?

Not so much.

Lorder drugs him up and tortures him before attacking him with electrified nunchucks, and Dargan tries to drown him.

You're getting the point by now, no doubt. But the piece de resistance, the part of RaulMonkey's script summary that compelled us to write this post, is screenwriter Luck's setup for the movie's climax:

What do they have against their old pal Snake?

All right, here's where we enter major SPOILER territory (if anyone's going to hold out on this sucker being published.) Snake eventually runs into a man named Oral Turnwheel.

We see him a couple of times spying on Snake throughout the movie--he rides in a limousine filled with rats, and wears only a white tunic, like Gandhi. It seems that he owns a conglomeration of all the major military contractors on Los Angeles, and the Americans have given him the run of the island. He has devised a method of cloning the world's finest soldiers while removing certain genetic limitations, and retaining the benefit of the memories and experiences of the original subject.

Turnwheel plans to sell the super-clones wholesale to all of the world's major powers. The Drummond, Lorder and Dargan that Snake fought were examples of these clones and, as you may have guessed, Turnwheel already has a line of Snake Plissken clones in production, and his model is meant to be the best of the best.

Turnwheel claims that everything that has happened to Snake on L.A. was controlled by him in order to show the world that Snake is unbeatable...unbeatable by everyone except the exquisitely crafted Snake-clones he has made!

Send in the clones, indeed. It's almost as if Kojima and his scriptwriters had climbed inside the heads of Carpenter and Luck while the screenplay for this ultimately abortive version of "Escape From L.A." was being written. The final confrontation between Plissken and his clone seems very much like the kind of concept that would have Kojima and nodding in agreement: Plissken sacrifices himself by throwing himself into the clone vat; his clone touches the Snake-fluid, absorbing Plissken's emotions and memories, then turns against Turnwheel and destroying his clone factory. And since this version of "Escape From L.A." is a prequel, it means that the Plissken we saw in "Escape From New York" was actually the clone, not the original.

For those of us who are both fans of "Escape From New York" and steeped in the mythology of Big Boss and his three clones--Solid Snake, Liquid Snake and Solidus Snake--the unveiling of Luck's screenplay serves as an intriguing footnote, revealing a shared essence and suggesting that at one point, the two franchises were like snakes chasing one another's tails. We hope you've enjoyed this ephemera; in the meantime, we've submitted some questions to Kojima to get his thoughts on all of this, and if we hear back from him, we'll be sure to tell you what he had to say.