Starting as a midquel story (set between Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots staring Raiden), Kojima Productions first teased of their development of Metal Gear Solid: Rising in 2009. Going through development hell, the studio nearly cancelled the title, attributing the main cause to the conflict between the game design (Raiden could cut anything), level design (and related programming associated) and the desire to have the game as both a stealth title and an action one.
Hideo Kojima later approached Platinum Games to propose a developer collaboration, thus Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance was born. The story shifted to being set after Metal Gear Solid 4 and the new collaboration brought about a strong emphasis on hack and slash gameplay. The title is not considered part of the canonical Metal Gear Solid series, but is rather a spinoff from MGS4.