For the second time this year, the German firearms brand Heckler & Koch has released a post on their X account in the U.S. that references a video game. Er, technically it’s the third time, considering that a few days ago they also posted an image with one of their submachine guns resting on someone’s PC gaming setup with the headline “From screen time to range time.” Previously in February, they made a post that referenced Half-Life, presumably because the game represents their famous MP5 submachine gun, which you can read more about here. This time around, they were a little more coy with their reference. Just today on their X page, there’s a photo of a tilted handgun with the innocuous melodic quote “when you can’t even say my name” above it.
This one is quite a deep cut. Fans of the influential stealth genre Metal Gear Solid may perk their ears up reading that headline. Or not, because the song its lyrics reference isn’t even in the game. But the community on the internet thought that Duran Duran’s “Invisible” fit the ‘80s vibe of Metal Gear Solid V rather well, so it became an unofficial anthem for the game on social media, as this Reddit page mentions. The question is, however, why H&K are tying one of their pistols to the series. The marketing reason for that isn’t clear, or perhaps ethical, but the logical reason is that variant of this specific pistol, the Mk23, is protagonist Snake’s silenced sidearm of choice in many of the games in the world of Metal Gear. The unofficial wiki for the game classifies the pistol that Snake(s) wields as the SOCOM version of the gun, which, suitably for a stealthy environment, has an attached suppressor and laser sight, both in game and in real life.
Guns have been an iconic element of video game combat since their inception, and as such, there has been an uncomfortable tension shared between guns and their fictional representations. They are after all, as interesting as they may be in the world of video games, tools of violence in the real world. And while there is no issue with violence or the presence of guns in video games, that aforementioned tension is pulled a little more taut when firearms companies market their civilian models as representations of entertainment rather than tools.