Konami’s highly anticipated Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has officially gone gold in preparation for its impending worldwide release on June 12, 2008.

Speaking in a conference yesterday, Konami Digital Entertainment President Fumiaki Tanaka commented: “In recent years, casual games have become extremely popular. With the rise of new consumers, the [game industry] is expanding into new directions.”

“While it’s said that the current mainstream is casual games, we took the challenge to make a blockbuster title, Metal Gear Solid 4, headed by Kojima,” he added.

“Metal Gear Solid 4 surpasses the scale of its previous titles in all aspects, including their story, visuals, and music. Using the PlayStation 3’s high capabilities to its capacity, I believe that our developers have realized Metal Gear Solid 4 without any compromise.”

Tanaka added that the company is keen to explore the capabilities of the PS3 further, and will continue to develop more titles for the system.

“We believe that the PlayStation 3 still has some undiscovered capabilities, and there’s still many points where we can be more clever to take its full advantage,” he said. “We will continue to create more good products in the future.”

Following Tanaka’s comments, Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima took to the stage, proudly announcing, “I’m very happy that we can announce the completion of Metal Gear Solid 4 in front of everyone here today.”

“Metal Gear Solid 4 has been an extremely difficult project. At one point, it was like an eternal spiral where the game felt like it would never get completed no matter how hard we worked on it.”

“We took on all sorts of challenges in the making of Metal Gear Solid 4,” explained Kojima. “We were challenged to make Metal Gear Solid 4 on the Cell-processor-operated, unknown monster of a hardware called the PlayStation 3. We were challenged to make Metal Gear Solid 4 in high definition graphics and 5.1ch surround sound so that it’d play in the leagues of movies.”

“We were challenged to give Metal Gear Solid 4 the most [content] in the series, and so we had the largest number of developers working [on the franchise] ever. We were challenged to release the game simultaneously worldwide for the first time. And, we were challenged to make it the last title in the series, as the game will be the conclusion to the Metal Gear Saga.”

Following a discussion on the current state of the games industry, Kojima picked up a control pad and took the audience through the first chapter of Metal Gear Solid 4, titled “Liquid Sun” – on hard mode, we might add.

He then unveiled plans to undertake a “Metal Gear Solid 4 World Tour”, where the team at Kojima Productions will travel to various cities across the world for a meet and greet with fans. The tour is scheduled to hit London, Madrid, Milano, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Stay tuned for more coverage on MGS4 in the coming weeks.

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