Project Beta

Banshee Project Beta is the working title for Banshee Interactive’s closed-ended quick-to-market product; externally a showcase of in-house design ethos and internally as an essential benchmark of team capabilities prior to mainline titles.

Banshee Project Beta is designated internally as a narrative-first genre piece, heavily influenced yet radically independent .

The overall premise will be to tackle a narrative-style adopted by Hideo Kojima-sensei during Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, being that the narrative unfolds around the players avatar, rather than being directly influenced by player actions.

This is a polar opposite approach to Banshee Project Alpha, with a shared end-goal of asymmetry between titles.

In relation to the mid-career work of Kojima-sensei, Roberts wishes to continue pursuing the theme of indirect narrative storytelling. Sons of Liberty is not Raiden’s story, and Snake Eater is not purely the story of Naked Snake.

Kojima-sensei has explicitly stated that the move to Raiden was to showcase Solid Snake from an external point-of-view, and the main themes of the title are regarding the true source of individual agency. This is reflected in Snake Eater.

Snake Eater (whilst never to my knowledge publicly defined as such) is clearly a title in which we see thematic evolution of this narrative delivery. It is a title that tells the narrative of Eva, Ocelot, and Big Boss: a radically different persona part-inherited, part-adopted by Naked Snake.

In neither title do the actions of the player have any consequences on the immediate narrative. The player is, for all intent and purpose, useless. That is not to say helpless, but that their actions have no lasting consequence in the immediate narrative.

This is culminated in the events of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, but as that title utilises the real-word time difference between titles and multiple entries (including the above titles) to categorise the series into the distinct observer vs participant narratives to do so, this is unable to be replicated within a single closed-ended title. Late 2026-early 2027 will be dedicate to dissection of Kojima works where a full dissection will be made.

Banshee Project Beta is in early-stage conceptualisation.