So the next day, I asked him, “So how is it?” He was shellshocked. “Snake died, man.” Excitement was gone. His day at school was ruined. I didn’t check in with him later, but presumably, a 7th grader couldn’t make heads or tails of the ending of that game, if he made it that far.

Sounds like you asked him right after he finished the Tanker chapter but before “Iroquois Pliskin” showed up.

I didn’t play it myself until a few years later, and it was one of the most talked-about endings in all of video games, because it was so barely comprehensible, at best.

The ending was mangled due to 9/11 happening right before the game’s release and them rushing to sanitize the scenes involving huge swaths of Manhattan being leveled by a ship ramming into it. Presumably the original cut was more coherent, but I’m guessing nothing could have lessened the mindfuck of “every leader of the Patriots has been dead for over a century”.