Let's pretend for a moment that we live in a parallel world in which whatever happened between Hideo Kojima and Konami never happened, and in which Yoji Shinkawa's absolutely fantastic artwork still stars front and center in Metal Gear Solid covers.

Today a piece of fantastic key artwork by Shinkawa-san was revealed, and it allows us to fly with our imagination to that world, and think about the cover that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain would deserve.

It's a personal interpretation, so please forgive any liberties I may have taken. No disrespect is meant towards the actual cover, which is lovely in its own right (even if it lacks two very important things), but this is just what poured out of my heart to pay homage to Shinkawa-san's art and Kojima-san's masterful work.

If you like it, I prepared a version for each platform and a clean one for PC, or if you like it with all the superfluous elements. It's print ready, so feel free to use it. Just right click on each image and select "save image as" to get the full resolution, high DPI download.

The green bar at the top of the Xbox One version has been added just for effect, as Xbox One cases have it by default. Just cut it out and it'll work nicely.