Really not giving a shit about anything… Essentially, depending on the situation, this character is very basic because he has one thing in mind, and that’s survival. A combination of this feller and my own alter ego.

I grew up with him in high school, he was my best friend.

All of these guys have certain basic things in common, and they’re based on a real guy that I knew. “Snake Plissken in ‘Escape’, Napoleon Wilson in ‘Assault’, Desolation Williams in Ghosts of Mars. “There are several characters that I have done in movies that are based on the same kind of guy,” Carpenter would say. It was during this time that Carpenter began to iron-out the template for his own particular brand of reluctant hero. Snake, written with Clint Eastwood in mind while Carpenter was still a student at USC, would sit in the boot of the budding director’s car for close to a decade along with a script titled Escape From New York. Snake - who would become the inspiration for the first truly cinematic video game in Metal Gear Solid - is an amalgamation of heroic archetypes, a caricature who appeals to our basest fantasies, who approaches his valiance with an outward unwilling that speaks to our cynicism towards authority, questioning the very definition of heroism in a political context. Everything about the character screams iconic, from his pirate eyepatch and cowboy snarl to his sneering distrust of all things authoritarian. Snake Plissken is one of the great American antiheroes. John Carpenter’s scathing dystopian classic was closer to reality than you may have imagined

Snake escape from new york jacket