When Konami Gave An Amputee Gamer Big Boss’s Bionic Arm

  As Metal Gear Solid fans will know, Big Boss is all kinds of a badass. This is a man who spawned Solid Snake (and the Brit-tastic Liquid), a man who brought us some of the series’ best moments starring in Snake Eater and The Phantom Pain.

Most important, in the fifth instalment, this is a man who has a pretty freaking awesome prosthetic arm. So famous is said arm, it’s been featured in a documentary by Merry Olde England’s BBC. Well, kinda sorta.  

What we’re talking here is a real-life arm engineered by Konami, worn by James Young. This avid gamer lost an arm and a leg in a train accident, and had himself one crafted by Sophie De Oliviera. As GameSpot reports, Oliviera claims that the fancy-ass techtastic in the arm is worth over $100,000, despite the fact that it… sucked ass when Young first tried it.

As he states in Bodyhack: Metal Gear Man, ‘"The arm, it's not ready. It's been forced into the public eye… It needs to take its first steps, but it can't walk. It can't even crawl… I was hoping this arm was going to move me on with accepting my disability and the whole thing about designing one that represents a bit of my personality is that I have control, it's something I've got control over… But now, when I put this on, I don't have control. I literally don't have control of it. And so it's been a bit of a step back, and it's made me just go, 'Oh, I'm still powerless to sort myself out basically.'"

Form over function? Nuts to that. This guy isn’t cosplaying at some nerdly comic con. Does the story have a happy ending? Do man and arm become one? You’ll have to watch the documentary to find out (Phantom Pain spoilers alert):