As brilliant and overdone as the recent Metal Gear Solid 4 was the ending left a tear to my eye and a small amount of dismay at the end of one of the best series of video games ever.

While Hideo Kojima executive producer has stated that this was indeed his final Metal Gear Solid game and the end of Solid Snake’s era this does not mean the end of the Metal Gear franchise which is a title held firmly for Konami who have expressed potential future plans for the blockbuster series.

Multi-platform gaming website Siliconera today have discovered two new trademarks registered in Japan by Konami as being “Metal Gear Solid Existence” and just “Existence” alone. With the above picture as supported imagery released by Konami the title obviously implies another MGS game in the works which is really quite suprising, so soon.

While another Metal Gear title was always a certainty the fact that this is a proper “Metal Gear Solid” title raises a lot of questions as to what this could possibly be. The past has seen several remakes and re-realeases of MGS titles with similar title suffixes such as “Substance” and “Subsistence” but these were also usually to support a multi-platform release or something like online play (already in MGS 4) and I don’t see MGS 4 being available on any other platform anytime soon, or possibly ever.

Then the PSP titles come to mind, but they have always been “Metal Gear Acid” installments. A title alone gives very little to speculate on but considering the use of the word “Solid” I’ll tentatively await the potential return of Solid Snake.