Metal Gear Solid theme plagiarized? John Carpenter nods vigorously ...

I realize that bringing this up, for many of you, is like telling a group of Irish-Catholic nuns that Jesus knocked up a hooker, but unlike the mysteriously popular work of Dan Brown, that film up there is completely sans Tom Hanks.

For those of you who need commentary on everything, that video up there depicts a Russian journalist meeting with Hideo Kojima and demonstrating a piece of music by Russian composer Georgy Sviridov. A piece created by the late Mr. Sviridov in 1974 -- according to my research, it is more than not likely a piece entitled Snow Storm, based on the poetry of Alexander Pushkin -- that sounds suspiciously similar to the theme used in Kojima's Metal Gear Solid games. While Kojima seems rather amused by the similarity, he neither admits his famous theme to be derivative, nor does he claim it isn't. The video ends by superimposing the song over footage of Metal Gear Solid 4 and never definitively resolves the issue, but the similarities are quite obviously there.

I've included a performance of the MGS theme during a Video Games Live concert after the jump for those of you who would like to compare and contrast. Once you've heard both tunes, feel free to speculate as wildly as you'd like. For my part, I'd like to add: Jesus was black, JFK was eaten by a bear from space and the CIA makes billions of dollars yearly by producing snuff films starring livestock and young Korean women.