Solid Snake

is a fictional character and the main protagonist of Konami's Metal Gear series of stealth video game. Created by Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear is Konami's main franchise and has sold approximately 26.5 million units as of February 2009. Introduced in the first game of the series, Metal Gear (MG) (1987), Snake has appeared in the majority of subsequent games and spin-offs. Japanese voice actor Akio Ōtsuka voices Snake in Japanese, while actor and screenwriter David Hayter provides the English voice of the character. In his guest appearance in Ape Escape 3, he is voiced in English by Peter Lurie.

Solid Snake is a combination spy, special operations agent and mercenary of FOXHOUND, a fictional black operation and espionage unit. He is repeatedly tasked with disarming and destroying the latest incarnation of Metal Gear, a bipedal nuclear weapon-armed mecha. Controlled by the player, Solid Snake must act alone (or with the help of allies he meets during missions), supported via radio by commanding officers and specialists.

Metal Gear, initially released in 1987 on the MSX2 home computer and later ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System, introduces Solid Snake, the rookie recruit of the elite special-forces unit FOXHOUND. Snake is sent by team leader Big Boss into the rogue nation Outer Heaven to rescue his missing teammate Gray Fox and discover who or what the "METAL GEAR" mentioned is, and as his mission progresses he finds out that he has been set up; the leader of Outer Heaven is actually Big Boss, who intends to use Metal Gear—an experimental, nuclear-armed mecha—to establish Outer Heaven as a nuclear power. After destroying the Metal Gear itself, he then confronts Big Boss and defeats him.

Much as Metal Gear began as a pastiche of action movies of the time, Solid Snake began as a pastiche of contemporary action movie heroes. For example, on the cover artwork of the original Metal Gear, he resembles Michael Biehn in The Terminator, the in-game portrait of Snake in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake resembles Mel Gibson in the game's opening sequence. Solid Snake was even named after another fictional special forces operative: Snake Plissken, Kurt Russell's character in Escape from New York.