David Hayter is satisfied with his run as the voice of Solid Snake

David Hayter may have been annoyed by the “Metal Gear 5 debacle,” as stated in Game Informer’s recent podcast on the inside story of recording Metal Gear Solid, but he’s still satisfied with his run as the voice of Solid Snake.

He may have no love for Hideo Kojima, but he’s still grateful he got the chance to voice the main protagonist of the Metal Gear series.

Hayter was the voice of Snake up until Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, in which Kiefer Sutherland of 24 fame provided the voice, and Hayter suddenly found himself out of another job. But it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before.

In addition to being a voice actor, Hayter is also a screenwriter, famous for, among other things, the screenplay for the first X-Men movie.

“It’s horrible, and it’s humiliating, but I work in Hollywood, and I’m a screenwriter so, I kind of get– I mean I get fired from every job I get. I mean, that’s just the nature of the business.”

Hayter talked about a painting he once tweeted of a baby wolf, dead after being shot by an arrow, lying in a pool of blood. “The old me,” it says above it. Next to it stands an adult wolf, back riddled with upwards of 20 arrows. Bleeding. Teeth bared. “Me now,” reads the text above it.

“That’s kind of how you get with these things. I mean, it was annoying to me because I felt like I’d given a lot to the series, and I’d really helped promote it and been a big cheerleader for the whole thing. But at the same time, I genuinely feel that the run I had as Snake was remarkable, and if you get that once in your career, that’s amazing.”

That being said, Hayter does believe that the whole thing could have been handled better, perhaps more respectfully, earlier in the podcast recounting an encounter he had with a series producer.

“I said ‘so I understand you’re gearing up for Metal Gear.’ He was like ‘Yeah.’ I said ‘Okay, well do you need me to do anything? Should we discuss the deal?’ He was like “No, we won’t be needing you at the moment. So we’ll let you know if anything changes.’ That was basically it. So then I talked to Kris Zimmerman, and she said ‘Yeah, we’re going forward, but it looks like they’re going to try to replace you.’ So I was like ‘Okay. Well, let me know if that–‘ Because they tried to do that before, and it never worked. They tried to get voice matches and that never happened so, I said ‘Okay, well let me know if that doesn’t work out, and I’ll come back.’ And if not, I guess that’s a pretty good run.”