There's been a lot of talk about Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots recently, largely thanks to the recent announcement that the third Metal Gear Solid game is being remastered alongside a new collection of other games from the famous franchise.
Metal Gear Solid 4 remains exclusive to the PlayStation 3, and hasn't been ported to any other system. Time will tell if Konami will choose to remaster it in the near future, but for the time being, it's a Sony-only title – although there were tentative plans to release it on the Xbox 360 back in the day, despite Sony itself claiming that the title was an exclusive deal between the company and Konami.
That's according to former Kojima Productions staffer Ryan Payton, who spoke to Steven L. Kent in his Ultimate History of Video Games: Volume 2. Contrary to popular belief, there was no exclusive agreement for MGS4 to be a PS3 system exclusive, and this is evidenced by the fact that Konami assigned a team to work on testing the game on Xbox 360 to see if a full port would be possible.
"Despite how downtrodden my colleagues were with developing on PS3, most of them were still hardcore Sony fans and were not in favour of spending resources on such a test," Payton says. "They believed MGS4 would look and run terribly on Microsoft's older and inferior hardware. One fateful day, the Konami R&D team hosted a meeting where we got to see the fruits of their labour - Metal Gear Solid 4 running beautifully and smoothly on an Xbox 360. As one of the few unabashed Xbox fans in the office, I was excited."
The reason we didn't see the game hit Xbox 360? The fact that Microsoft's console used DVD as its game delivery media. PlayStation 3 used Blu-ray, which allowed for bigger games; MGS4 took up 50GB of space (even on PS3, it had to be published on a special double-layer Blu-ray, the first PS3 title to do so). Releasing the game on Xbox 360 would have required it to span multiple discs, and that was clearly a no-go for Konami.