Solid Snake is a gaming legend: an icon of the industry that not only defines a mythology and a developer, but stands as a mascot to quality. He has just made a triumphant and long-awaited return to the video game arena in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and you can read our glowing review here – it was written by a man who, we kid you not, has shared a urinal with Kojima himself, a lifetime highlight that will one day be etched onto his tombstone alongside ‘died with a smile on his face’.

But this is not the only startling piece of information we have to share with you today – the Snake walks amongst us! One of our eagle-eyed Official Australian PlayStation magazine readers (our sister publication), Mr. Alistair Richardson, recently found himself in the presence of the man and, as you can see from the image above, took photographic evidence of the fact. To double check we merged the man with his in-game costume and hey presto, we had a match!

What were the events that lead to this historic discovery? We’ll let Alistair explain…

'' Hi my name is Alastair. I own a PS3 and have owned a PlayStation since the PSX. I bought my own PSX back in about 1998, I was young and had to save hard because my folks were against gaming and television and all that commercial stuff that came on the "Idiot Box" as dad called it.

So against my parent’s ideals I bought my first PlayStation and was the happiest kid on Earth. I had a small collection of games including Driver, Soul Reaver and Metal Gear Solid. Now that brings me to the interesting part.

Metal Gear Solid - or more to the point MGS4: Guns of the Patriots. I have a brother and he got married recently, so I was at the wedding and there were lots of family members about, some of which I had not seen for years. One man in particular caught my attention. An uncle of mine that had aged considerably since I last saw him - maybe more than ten years prior. I looked at him and thought "I recognise that face and not just as the face of my aged uncle." Then it dawned on me and I found myself thinking "Snake....... Solid Snake?......Snake....What happened............. Snake............ SSNNNAAAAAKE!"

I had my camera with me and snapped a few shots. So there you have it! Solid Snake in real life! I thought he was a carpenter, but it looks like my uncle is a badass stealth killer ''.

There you have it gamers. We don’t know how we would feel if we found out it was our uncle we had been in love with all these years - Kojima would be proud. Anyway, much respect to Alistair for having a hairy enough pair to tell the world.

yeah i can see it kinda. Thought the nose is different. Besides that, i think they could be twins.

thats not solid snake thats old snake but wow thats really weird