title: University of Edinburgh

text: The Central Area is spread around numerous squares and streets in Edinburgh's "Southside", with some buildings in Old Town. It is the university's oldest area, occupied primarily by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and the School of Informatics. The highest concentration of university buildings is around George Square, which includes 40 George Square (formerly David Hume Tower), Appleton Tower, Main Library, and Gordon Aikman Lecture Theatre, the area's largest lecture hall. Around nearby Bristo Square lie the Dugald Stewart Building, Informatics Forum, McEwan Hall, Potterrow Student Centre, Teviot Row House, and old Medical School, which still houses pre-clinical medical courses and biomedical sciences. The Pleasance, one of Edinburgh University Students' Association's main buildings, is located nearby, as is Edinburgh College of Art in Lauriston. North of George Square lies the university's Old College housing Edinburgh Law School, New College on The Mound housing the School of Divinity, and St Cecilia's Hall. Some of these buildings are used to host events during the Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe every summer.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: Pollock Halls, adjoining Holyrood Park to the east, is the university's largest residence hall for undergraduate students in their first year. The complex houses over 2,000 students during term time and consists of ten named buildings with communal green spaces between them. The two original buildings, St Leonard's Hall and Salisbury Green, were built in the 19th century, while the majority of Pollock Halls dates from the 1960s and early 2000s. Two of the older houses in Pollock Halls were demolished in 2002, and a new building, Chancellor's Court, was built in their place and opened in 2003. Self-catered flats elsewhere account for the majority of university-provided accommodation. The area also includes the John McIntyre Conference Centre opened in 2009, which is the university's premier conference space.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The Holyrood campus, just off the Royal Mile, used to be the site for "Moray House Institute for Education" until it merged with the university on 1 August 1998. The university has since extended this campus. The buildings include redeveloped and extended Sports Science, Physical Education and Leisure Management facilities at St Leonard's Land linked to the Sports Institute in the Pleasance. The £80 million O'Shea Hall at Holyrood was named after the former principal of the university Sir Timothy O'Shea and was opened by Princess Anne in 2017, providing a living and social environment for postgraduate students. The Outreach Centre, Institute for Academic Development (University Services Group), and Edinburgh Centre for Professional Legal Studies are also located at Holyrood.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The King's Buildings campus is located in the south of the city. Most of the Science and Engineering College's research and teaching activities take place at the campus, which occupies a 35-hectare site. It includes the Alexander Graham Bell Building (for mobile phones and digital communications systems), James Clerk Maxwell Building (the administrative and teaching centre of the School of Physics and Astronomy and School of Mathematics), Joseph Black Building (home to the School of Chemistry), Royal Observatory, Swann Building (the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology), Waddington Building (the Centre for Systems Biology at Edinburgh), William Rankine Building (School of Engineering's Institute for Infrastructure and Environment), and others. Until 2012, the KB campus was served by three libraries: Darwin Library, James Clerk Maxwell Library, and Robertson Engineering and Science Library. These were replaced by the Noreen and Kenneth Murray Library opened for the academic year 2012/13. The campus also hosts the National e-Science Centre (NeSC), Scotland's Rural College (SRUC), Scottish Institute for Enterprise (SIE), Scottish Microelectronics Centre (SMC), and Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC).


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The BioQuarter campus, based in the Little France area, is home to the majority of medical facilities of the university, alongside the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. The campus houses the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic, Centre for Regenerative Medicine, Chancellor's Building, Euan MacDonald Centre, and Queen's Medical Research Institute, which opened in 2005. The Chancellor's Building has two large lecture theatres and a medical library connected to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh by a series of corridors.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The Easter Bush campus, located seven miles south of the city, houses the Jeanne Marchig International Centre for Animal Welfare Education, Roslin Institute, Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, and Veterinary Oncology and Imaging Centre.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The Roslin Institute is an animal sciences research institute which is sponsored by BBSRC. The Institute won international fame in 1996, when its researchers Sir Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and their colleagues created Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. A year later Polly and Molly were cloned, both sheep contained a human gene.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The Western General campus, in proximity to the Western General Hospital, contains the Biomedical Research Facility, Edinburgh Clinical Research Facility, and Institute of Genetics and Cancer (formerly the Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine).


title: University of Edinburgh

text: In common with the other ancient universities of Scotland, and in contrast to nearly all other pre-1992 universities which are established by royal charters, the University of Edinburgh is constituted by the Universities (Scotland) Acts 1858 to 1966. These acts provide for three major bodies in the governance of the university: the University Court, the General Council, and the "Senatus Academicus".


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The University Court is the university's governing body and the legal person of the university, chaired by the rector and consisting of the principal, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, and of Assessors appointed by the rector, chancellor, Edinburgh Town Council, General Council, and "Senatus Academicus". By the Universities (Scotland) Act 1889, it is a body corporate, with perpetual succession and a common seal. All property belonging to the university at the passing of the Act was vested in the Court. The present powers of the Court are further defined in the Universities (Scotland) Act 1966, including the administration and management of the university's revenue and property, the regulation of staff salaries, and the establishment and composition of committees of its own members or others.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The General Council consists of graduates, academic staff, current and former University Court members. It was established to ensure that graduates have a continuing voice in the management of the university. The Council is required to meet twice per year to consider matters affecting the wellbeing and prosperity of the university. The Universities (Scotland) Act 1966 gave the Council the power to consider draft ordinances and resolutions, to be presented with an annual report of the work and activities of the university, and to receive an audited financial statement. The Council elects the chancellor of the university and three Assessors on the University Court.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The "Senatus Academicus" is the university's supreme academic body, chaired by the principal and consisting of the professors, heads of departments, and a number of readers, lecturers and other teaching and research staff. The core function of the "Senatus" is to regulate and supervise the teaching and discipline of the university and to promote research. The "Senatus" elects four Assessors on the University Court. The "Senatus" meets three times per year, hosting a presentation and discussion session which is open to all members of staff at each meeting.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The university's three most significant officials are its chancellor, rector, and principal, whose rights and responsibilities are largely derived from the Universities (Scotland) Act 1858.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The office of chancellor serves as the titular head and highest office of the university. Their duties include conferring degrees and enhancing the profile and reputation of the university on national and global levels. The chancellor is elected by the university's General Council, and a person generally remains in the office for life. Previous chancellors include former prime minister Arthur Balfour and novelist Sir J. M. Barrie. Princess Anne has held the position since March 2011 succeeding Prince Philip. She is also Patron of the university's Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The office of rector is elected every three years by the staff and matriculated students. The primary role of the rector is to preside at the University Court. The rector also chairs meetings of the General Council in absence of the chancellor. They work closely with students and Edinburgh University Students' Association. Previous rectors include microbiologist Sir Alexander Fleming, and former Prime Ministers Sir Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. The current rector is human rights lawyer Debora Kayembe, who has held the position since March 2021.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The principal is responsible for the overall operation of the university in a chief executive role. The principal is formally nominated by the Curators of Patronage and appointed by the University Court. They are the President of the "Senatus Academicus" and a member of the University Court "ex officio". The principal is also automatically appointed vice-chancellor, in which role they confer degrees on behalf of the chancellor. Previous principals include physicist Sir Edward Victor Appleton and religious philosopher Stewart Sutherland. The current principal is nephrologist Peter Mathieson, who has held the position since February 2018.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: In 2002, the university was reorganised from its nine faculties into three 'Colleges'. While technically not a collegiate university, it comprises the Colleges of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS), Science & Engineering (CSE) and Medicine & Vet Medicine (CMVM). Within these colleges are 'Schools', which either represent one academic discipline such as Informatics or assemble adjacent academic disciplines such as the School of History, Classics and Archaeology. While bound by College-level policies, individual Schools can differ in their organisation and governance. As of 2021, the university has 21 schools in total.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The College took on its current name of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in 2016 after absorbing the Edinburgh College of Art in 2011. CAHSS offers more than 280 undergraduate degree programmes, 230 taught postgraduate programmes, and 200 research postgraduate programmes. Twenty subjects offered by the college were ranked within the top 10 nationally in the 2022 "Complete University Guide". It includes the oldest English Literature department in Britain, which was ranked 7th globally in the 2021 "QS Rankings by Subject" in English Language & Literature. The college hosts Scotland's ESRC Doctoral Training Centre (DTC), the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science. The college is the largest of the three colleges by enrolment, with 26,130 students and 3,089 academic staff.<ref name="Student Figures 2020/21"></ref>


title: University of Edinburgh

text: Edinburgh Medical School was widely considered the best medical school in the English-speaking world throughout the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century and contributed significantly to the university's international reputation. Graduates of the medical school have founded medical schools and universities all over the world including 5 out of the 7 Ivy League medical schools (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Pennsylvania and Dartmouth), Vermont, McGill, Sydney, Montréal, the Royal Postgraduate Medical School (now part of Imperial College London), the Cape Town, Birkbeck, Middlesex Hospital and the London School of Medicine for Women (both now part of UCL).


title: University of Edinburgh

text: In the 21st century, the reputation of the medical school has excelled; the school is associated with 13 Nobel Prize recipients: 7 recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and 6 recipients of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The medical school in 2022 was ranked 1st in the UK by the Guardian University Guide, In 2021, it was ranked third in the UK by The Times University Guide, and the Complete University Guide. It also ranked 21st in the world by both the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and the QS World University Rankings in the same year.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies is a world leader in veterinary education, research and practice. The eight original faculties formed four Faculty Groups in August 1992. Medicine and Veterinary Medicine became one of these, and in 2002 became the smallest of the three colleges, with 7,740 students and 1,896 academic staff. The university's teaching hospitals include the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, Western General Hospital, St John's Hospital, Livingston, Roodlands Hospital, and Royal Hospital for Children and Young People.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: In the 16th century, science was taught as "natural philosophy" in the university. The 17th century saw the institution of the University Chairs of Mathematics and Botany, followed the next century by Chairs of Natural History, Astronomy, Chemistry and Agriculture. It was Edinburgh's professors who took a leading part in the formation of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783. Joseph Black, Professor of Medicine and Chemistry at the time, founded the world's first Chemical Society in 1785. The first named degrees of Bachelor and Doctor of Science was instituted in 1864, and a separate Faculty of Science was created in 1893 after three centuries of scientific advances at Edinburgh. The Regius Chair in Engineering was established in 1868, and the Regius Chair in Geology in 1871. In 1991 the Faculty of Science was renamed the Faculty of Science and Engineering, and in 2002 it became the College of Science and Engineering. The college has 11,745 students and 2,937 academic staff.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The university is a member of the Russell Group of research-led British universities, and the "Sutton 13" group of top-ranked universities in the UK. It is the only British university to be a member of both the Coimbra Group and the League of European Research Universities, and it is a founding member of Una Europa and Universitas 21, both international associations of research-intensive universities. The university maintains historically strong ties with the neighbouring Heriot-Watt University for teaching and research. Edinburgh also offers a wide range of free online MOOC courses on three global platforms Coursera, Edx and FutureLearn.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: In 2020, Edinburgh had the seventh-highest average entry standards amongst universities in the UK, with new undergraduates averaging 190 UCAS points, equivalent to just above AAAaa in A-level grades. It gave offers of admission to 52.3% of its 18 year old applicants in 2019, the fifth-lowest amongst the Russell Group.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: As the number of places available for Scottish and EU students are capped by the Scottish Government since students do not pay tuition fees, students applying from the rest of the UK and outside the EU have a higher likelihood of an offer. Excluding courses within Edinburgh College of Art, the most competitive courses for Scottish/EU applicants in 2020 were International Relations, Oral Health Science, and Politics, Philosophy & Economics (PPE), with offer rates of 9%, 10% and 11%, respectively. In comparison, students from the rest of the UK have a 40% chance of receiving an offer for International Relations, while students from outside the EU have an 80% chance.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: For the academic year 2019/20, 36.8% of Edinburgh's new undergraduates were privately educated, the second-highest proportion among mainstream British universities, behind only Oxford. As of August 2021, it has a higher proportion of female than male students with a male to female ratio of 38:62 in the undergraduate population, and the undergraduate student body is composed of 30% Scottish students, 32% from the rest of the UK, 10% from the EU, and 28% from outside the EU.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: At graduation ceremonies, graduates are being 'capped' with the "Geneva bonnet", which involves the university's principal tapping them on the head with the cap while they receive their graduation certificate. The velvet-and-silk hat has been used for over 150 years, and legend says that it was originally made from cloth taken from the breeches of 16th-century scholars John Knox or George Buchanan. However, when the hat was last restored in the early 2000s, a label dated 1849 was discovered bearing the name of Edinburgh tailor Henry Banks, although some doubt remains whether he manufactured or restored the hat. In 2006, a university emblem that had been taken into space by astronaut and Edinburgh graduate Piers Sellers was incorporated into the "Geneva bonnet".


title: University of Edinburgh

text: Pre-dating the university by three years, Edinburgh University Library was founded in 1580 through the donation of a large collection by Clement Litill, and today is the largest academic library collection in Scotland. The Brutalist style eight-storey Main Library building in George Square was designed by Sir Basil Spence. At the time of its completion in 1967, it was the largest building of its type in the UK, and today is a category A listed building. The library system also includes many specialised libraries at the college and school level.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The university offers students the opportunity to study in Europe and beyond via the European Union's Erasmus+ programme and a variety of international exchange agreements with around 300 partners institutions in nearly 40 countries worldwide.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: University-wide exchanges are open to almost any student whose degree permits a year abroad and who can find a suitable course combination. The list of partner institutions is shown as follows (part of):


title: University of Edinburgh

text: Subject-specific exchanges are open to students studying in particular schools or subject areas, including exchange programmes with Carnegie Mellon University, Emory University, EPFL, ETH Zurich, ESSEC Business School, ENS Paris, HEC Paris, Humboldt University of Berlin, Karolinska Institute, Kyoto University, LMU Munich, University of Michigan, Peking University, Rhode Island School of Design, Sorbonne University, TU München, Waseda University, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and others.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), which evaluated work produced between 2014 and 2021, Edinburgh ranked 4th by research power and 15th by GPA amongst British universities. The university fell four places in GPA when compared to the 2014 REF, but retained its place in research power. 90 per cent of the university's research activity was judged to be 'world leading' (4*) or 'internationally excellent' (3*), and five departments – Computer Science, Informatics, Sociology, Anthropology, and Development Studies – were ranked as the best in the UK.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: In the 2015 "THE Global Employability University Ranking", Edinburgh ranked 23rd in the world and 4th in the UK for graduate employability as voted by international recruiters. A 2015 government report found that Edinburgh was one of only two Scottish universities (along with St Andrews) that some London-based elite recruitment firms considered applicants from, especially in the field of financial services and investment banking. When "The New York Times" ranked universities based on the employability of graduates as evaluated by recruiters from top companies in 20 countries in 2012, Edinburgh was placed at 42nd in the world and 7th in Britain.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: Edinburgh was ranked 24th in the world and 5th in the UK by the 2021 "Aggregate Ranking of Top Universities", a league table based on the three major world university rankings, "ARWU", "QS" and "THE". In the 2022 "U.S. News & World Report", Edinburgh ranked 32nd globally and 5th nationally. The 2021 "World Reputation Rankings" placed Edinburgh at 30th worldwide and 6th nationwide. In 2021, it ranked 63rd amongst the universities around the world by the "SCImago Institutions Rankings".


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The noticeable disparity between Edinburgh's research capacity, endowment and international status on the one hand, and its ranking in national league tables on the other, is largely due to the impact of measures of 'student satisfaction'. Edinburgh was ranked last in the UK for teaching quality in the 2012 National Student Survey, with the 2015 "Good University Guide" stating that this stemmed from "questions to do with the promptness, usefulness and extent of academic feedback", and that the university "still has a long way to go to turn around a poor position". Edinburgh improved only marginally over the next years, with the 2021 "Good University Guide" still ranking it in the bottom 10 domestically in both teaching quality and student experience. Edinburgh was ranked 122nd out of 128 universities for student satisfaction in the 2022 "Complete University Guide", although it was ranked 12th overall. The 2022 "Guardian University Guide" ranked Edinburgh 12th overall, but 101st out of 119 universities in course satisfaction, and lowest among all universities in satisfaction with feedback.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: In the 2022 "Complete University Guide", 32 out of the 49 subjects offered by Edinburgh were ranked within the top 10 in the UK, with Asian Studies (4th), Chemical Engineering (4th), Education (2nd), Geology (5th), Linguistics (5th), Mechanical Engineering (5th), Medicine (5th), Music (5th), Nursing (1st), Physics & Astronomy (5th), Social Policy (5th), Theology & Religious Studies (4th), and Veterinary Medicine (2nd) within the top 5. The 2021 "THE World University Rankings by Subject" ranked Edinburgh 10th worldwide in Arts and Humanities, 15th in Law, 16th in Psychology, 21st in Clinical, Pre-clinical & Health, 22nd in Computer Science, 28th in Education, 28th in Life Science, 43rd in Business & Economics, 44th in Social Sciences, 45th in Physical Sciences, and 86th in Engineering & Technology. The 2022 "QS World University Rankings by Subject" placed Edinburgh at 9th globally in Arts & Humanities, 24th in Life Sciences & Medicine, 40th in Natural Sciences, 53rd in Social Sciences & Management, and 66th in Engineering & Technology. According to "CSRankings", computer science at Edinburgh was ranked 1st in the UK and 36th globally, and Edinburgh was the best in natural language processing (NLP) in the world.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: Edinburgh University Students' Association (EUSA) consists of the students' union and the students' representative council. EUSA's buildings include Teviot Row House, The Pleasance, Potterrow Student Centre, Kings Buildings House, as well as shops, cafés and refectories across the various campuses. Teviot Row House is considered the oldest purpose-built student union building in the world. Most of these buildings are operated as Edinburgh Festival Fringe venues during August. EUSA represents students to the university and the wider world, and is responsible for over 250 student societies at the university. The association has five sabbatical office bearers – a president and four vice presidents. EUSA is affiliated with the National Union of Students (NUS).


title: University of Edinburgh

text: Amateur dramatic societies benefit from Edinburgh being an important cultural hub for comedy, amateur and fringe theatre throughout the UK, most prominently through the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The Edinburgh University Music Society (EUMS) is a student-run musical organisation, which is Scotland's oldest student’s musical society; it can be traced back to a concert in February 1867. It performs three concert series throughout the year whilst also undertaking a programme of charity events and education projects.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The Edinburgh University Theatre Company (EUTC), founded in 1890 as the Edinburgh University Drama Society, is known for running Bedlam Theatre, the oldest student-run theatre in Britain and venue for the Fringe. EUTC also funds acclaimed improvisational comedy troupe The Improverts during term time and the Fringe. Alumni include Sir Michael Boyd, Ian Charleson, Kevin McKidd, and Greg Wise.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The Edinburgh Studio Opera (formerly Edinburgh University Opera Club) is a student opera company in Edinburgh. It performs at least one fully staged opera each year. The Edinburgh University Savoy Opera Group (EUSOG) is an opera and musical theatre company founded by students in 1961 to promote and perform the comic operettas of Sir William Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, collectively known as Savoy Operas after the theatre in which they were originally staged.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The Edinburgh University Footlights are a musical theatre company founded in 1989 and produce two large scale shows a year. Theatre Parodok, founded in 2004, is a student theatre company that aims to produce shows that are "experimental without being exclusive". They stage one large show each semester and one for the festival.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: "The Student" is a fortnightly student newspaper. Founded in 1887 by writer Robert Louis Stevenson, it is the oldest student newspaper in the United Kingdom. Former writers of the newspaper include politicians Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, and David Steel. It has been independent of the university since 1992, but was forced to temporarily fold in 2002 due to increasing debts. The newspaper won a number of student newspaper awards in the years following its relaunch.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: "The Journal" was an independent publication, established in 2007 by three students and former writers for "The Student." It was also distributed to other higher education institutions in the city, such as Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh Napier University, and Telford College. It was the largest such publication in Scotland, with a print run of 10,000 copies. Despite winning a number of awards for its journalism, the magazine folded in 2015 due to financial difficulties.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: FreshAir, launched on 3 October 1992, is an alternative music student radio station. The station is one of the oldest surviving student radio stations in the UK, and won the "Student Radio Station of the Year" award at the annual Student Radio Awards in 2004.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: In September 2015, the Edinburgh University Student Television (EUTV) became the newest addition to the student media scene at the university, producing a regular magazine-style programme, documentaries and other special events.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: Student sport at Edinburgh consists of clubs covering the more traditional rugby, football, rowing and judo, to the more unconventional korfball, gliding and mountaineering. In 2021, the university had over 65 sports clubs run by Edinburgh University Sports Union (EUSU).


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The Scottish Varsity, known as the "world's oldest varsity match", is a rugby match played annually against the University of St Andrews dating back over 150 years. Discontinued in the 1950s, the match was resurrected in 2011 and was staged in London at the home of London Scottish RFC. It is played at the beginning of the academic year, and since 2015 has been staged at Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The Scottish Boat Race is an annual rowing race between the Glasgow University Boat Club and the Edinburgh University Boat Club, rowed between competing eights on the River Clyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Started in 1877, it is believed to be the third-oldest university boat race in the world, predated by the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and the Harvard–Yale Regatta.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: Edinburgh athletes have repeatedly been successful at the Olympic Games: Sprinter Eric Liddell won gold and bronze at the 1924 Summer Olympics. At the 1948 Summer Olympics, alumnus Jackie Robinson won a gold medal with the American Basketball team. Trap shooter Bob Braithwaite secured a gold medal at the 1968 Summer Olympics. Cyclist Sir Chris Hoy won six gold and one silver medal between 2000 and 2012. Rower Dame Katherine Grainger won a gold medal at the 2012 Summer Olympics, and four further silver medals between 2000 and 2016. Edinburgh was the most successful UK university at the 2012 Games with two gold medals from Hoy and one from Grainger.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: There are a number of campaigning societies at the university. The largest of these include the environment and poverty campaigning group People & Planet and Amnesty International Society. International development organisations include Edinburgh Global Partnerships, which was established as a student-led charity in 1990. There is also a significant left-wing presence on campus, including an anti-austerity group, Edinburgh University Anarchist Society, Edinburgh University Socialist Society, Edinburgh Young Greens, Feminist Society, Marxist Society, and Students for Justice in Palestine.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: Protests, demonstrations and occupations are regular occurrences at the university. The activist group People & Planet took over Charles Stewart House in 2015 and again in 2016 in protest over the university's investment in companies active in arms manufacturing or fossil fuel extraction. In May 2015, a security guard was charged in relation to the occupations.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: There are three student-run co-operatives on campus: Edinburgh Student Housing Co-operative, providing affordable housing for 106 students; The Hearty Squirrel Food Cooperative, providing 'local, organic and affordable food to students and staff'; and The SHRUB Coop, a 'swap and re-use hub' aimed at reducing waste and promoting sustainability. The co-operatives form part of the Students for Cooperation network.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: The university is associated with some of the most significant intellectual and scientific contributions in human history, which include: the foundation of Antiseptic surgery (Joseph Lister), Bayesian statistics (Thomas Bayes), Economics (Adam Smith), Electromagnetism (James Clerk Maxwell), Evolution (Charles Darwin), Knot theory (Peter Guthrie Tait), mordern Geology (James Hutton), Nephrology (Richard Bright), Endocrinology (Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer), Hematology (William Hewson), Dermatology (Robert Willan), Epigenetics (C. H. Waddington), Gestalt psychology (Kurt Koffka), Thermodynamics (William Rankine),


title: University of Edinburgh

text: Colloid chemistry (Thomas Graham), and Wave theory (Thomas Young); the discovery of Brownian motion (Robert Brown), Magnesium, carbon dioxide, latent heat and specific heat (Joseph Black), chloroform anaesthesia (Sir James Young Simpson), Hepatitis B vaccine (Sir Kenneth Murray), Higgs mechanism (Sir Tom Kibble), structure of DNA (Sir John Randall), HPV vaccine (Ian Frazer), Iridium and Osmium (Smithson Tennant), Nitrogen (Daniel Rutherford), Strontium (Thomas Charles Hope), and SARS coronavirus (Zhong Nanshan); and the invention of the Stirling engine (Robert Stirling), Cavity magnetron (Sir John Randall), ATM (John Shepherd-Barron), refrigerator (William Cullen), diving chamber (John Scott Haldane), reflecting telescope (James Gregory), hypodermic syringe (Alexander Wood), kaleidoscope (Sir David Brewster), pneumatic tyre (John Boyd Dunlop), telephone (Alexander Graham Bell), telpherage (Fleeming Jenkin), and vacuum flask (Sir James Dewar).


title: University of Edinburgh

text: Other notable alumni and academic staff of the university have included signatories to the US Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush, James Wilson and John Witherspoon, actors Ian Charleson, Robbie Coltrane and Kevin McKidd, architects Robert Adam, William Thornton, William Henry Playfair, Sir Basil Spence and Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, astronaut Piers Sellers, biologists Sir Adrian Bird, Sir Richard Owen and Sir Ian Wilmut, business executives Tony Hayward, Alan Jope, Lars Rasmussen and Susie Wolff, composer Max Richter, economists Kenneth E. Boulding and Thomas Chalmers, historians Thomas Carlyle and Neil MacGregor, journalists Laura Kuenssberg and Peter Pomerantsev, judges Lord Reed and Lord Hodge, mathematicians Sir W. V. D. Hodge, Colin Maclaurin and Sir E. T. Whittaker, philosophers Benjamin Constant, Adam Ferguson, Ernest Gellner and David Hume, physicians Thomas Addison, William Cullen, Valentín Fuster, Thomas Hodgkin and James Lind, pilot Eric Brown, surgeons James Barry, Joseph Bell, Robert Liston and B. K. Misra, sociologists Sir Patrick Geddes and David Bloor, writers Sir J. M. Barrie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Fowles, Oliver Goldsmith, J. K. Rowling, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, Chancellors of the Exchequer John Anderson and Lord Henry Petty, former Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand Sir Michael Cullen, current Vice President of Syria Najah al-Attar, former Director General of MI5 Stella Rimington, First Lords of the Admiralty Lord Melville, Robert Dundas, 2nd Viscount Melville, Lord Minto and Lord Selkirk, Foreign Secretaries Robin Cook and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former acting First Minister of Scotland Jim Wallace, and Olympic gold medallists Bob Braithwaite, Katherine Grainger, Sir Chris Hoy and Eric Liddell.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: , 19 Nobel Prize laureates have been affiliated with the university as alumni, faculty members or researchers (three additional laureates acted as administrative staff), including one of the fathers of quantum mechanics Max Born, theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, chemist Sir Fraser Stoddart, immunologist Peter C. Doherty, economist Sir James Mirrlees, discoverer of Characteristic X-ray (Charles Glover Barkla) and the mechanism of ATP synthesis (Peter D. Mitchell), and pioneer in cryo-electron microscopy (Richard Henderson) and in-vitro fertilisation (Sir Robert Edwards). Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton, Robin Milner Leslie Valiant, and mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah, Fields Medalist and Abel Prize laureate, are associated with the university.


title: University of Edinburgh

text: In the following table, the number following a person's name is the year they received the Nobel prize. In particular, a number with an asterisk (*) means the person received the award while they were working at the university (including emeritus staff). A name underlined implies that this person has been listed previously (i.e., multiple affiliations).


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The story revolves around the Big Shell, a massive offshore clean-up facility seized by a group of terrorists who call themselves the Sons of Liberty. They demand an enormous ransom in exchange for the life of the President of the United States and threaten to destroy the facility and create a cataclysmic environmental disaster if their demands are not met. The motives and identities of many of the antagonists and allies change throughout the course of the game, as the protagonists discover a world-shaking conspiracy constructed by a powerful organization known as the Patriots.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: "Metal Gear Solid 2" received acclaim for its gameplay, graphics, and attention to detail. However, critics were initially divided on the protagonist and the philosophical nature and execution of the game's storyline, which explores themes such as the Information Age, memetics, social engineering, political conspiracies, censorship, artificial intelligence, existentialism, postmodernism, virtual reality, and the internal struggle of freedom of thought. The game was a commercial success, selling seven million copies by 2004. It has since been considered to be one of the greatest video games of all time, as well as a leading example of artistic expression in video games. The game is often considered ahead of its time for dealing with themes and concepts, such as post-truth politics, fake news, alternative facts, synthetic media, and echo chambers, that became culturally relevant in the 2010s.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: "Metal Gear Solid 2" carries the subtitle of "Tactical Espionage Action," and most of the game involves the protagonist sneaking around avoiding being seen by the enemies. Most fundamental is the broader range of skills offered to the player. The first-person aiming mode allows players to target specific points in the game, greatly expanding tactical options; guards can be blinded by steam, distracted by a flying piece of fruit or hit in weak spots. Players can walk slowly, allowing them to sneak over noisy flooring without making a sound, or hang off walkways to slip past below guards' feet. The corner-press move from "Metal Gear Solid", which allowed players a sneak peek around the next bend is expanded to allow players to fire from cover. Other abilities included leaping over and hanging off of railings, opening and hiding in storage lockers, and sneaking up behind enemies to hold them at gunpoint for items and ammunition. Players can shoot out the enemy's radio, so they are unable to communicate with others on their team. The environment also has a more significant impact on the stealth gameplay, taking into account factors such as weather, smell, atmosphere, and temperature.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: In "Metal Gear Solid 2", the enemy guards are given more advanced AI "to prevent an imbalance of power," and unlike the original "Metal Gear Solid", work in squads. They call on their radios for a strike team upon seeing the player, then attempt to flank him and cut off his escape while avoiding the player's attacks. Often strike teams will carry body armor and riot shields, making them a greater threat. Even if the player escapes to a hiding place, a team will sweep in to check the area. The game has a collective enemy AI, where enemy guards work together in squads, can communicate with one another, and react more realistically towards the player. The game's enemy AI was considered one of the best in gaming for many years.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The game expanded its predecessor's cover mechanic, with Solid Snake or Raiden able to take cover behind walls or objects and pop out to shoot at enemies, while the improved enemy AI allowed enemies to also take cover from the player character. The enemies will often take cover to call for backup, but during battle, they will take cover then pop out and shoot at the player or blindly throw grenades from behind their cover. The game features a laser sight mechanic, where a laser sight helps assist with manually aiming a gun. Boss battles and set-pieces remain a case of finding a strategy that bypasses the defenses of the enemy. However, in a major break from action game standards, it is also possible to clear the entire game, including boss fights, without causing a single deliberate death, through use of tranquilizer guns, stun grenades, and melee attacks.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: "Sons of Liberty" takes place within an alternate history of events, in which the Cold War ended during the late 1990s. The game's story focuses on two narratives that occur around and near New York City the first in 2007, two years after the events of "Metal Gear Solid"; and the second in 2009. The game's plot is the fourth chapter of an overarching plot concerning the character of Solid Snake.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The main protagonist of "Metal Gear Solid 2" is a young rookie agent named Raiden. He is supported by his commanding officer, the Colonel, and Rosemary, his girlfriend. Allies formed on the mission include Lt. Junior Grade Iroquois Pliskin, a Navy SEAL of mysterious background who provides his knowledge of the facility; Peter Stillman, an NYPD bomb-disposal expert; Otacon, a computer security specialist; and a cyborg ninja imitating Gray Fox's persona, first calling itself Deepthroat, then changing its name to Mr. X.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The antagonists are the Sons of Liberty, a group of terrorists who seize control of the Big Shell environmental cleanup facility, including anti-terrorist training unit gone rogue Dead Cell, and a Russian mercenary force that patrols the facility. The Dead Cell team members are Vamp, a seemingly immortal man exhibiting vampire-like attributes; Fatman, a rotund man with exceptional knowledge of bombs; and Fortune, a woman whose uncontrollable psychic ability prevents any bodily harm from befalling her. The leader of Sons of Liberty claims to be Solid Snake, previously declared dead after a terrorist attack, later revealed to be Solidus Snake, a third clone of the "Les Enfants Terribles" project. Assisting the Sons of Liberty are Olga Gurlukovich, commander of the Russian mercenaries, and Revolver Ocelot, a disenfranchised Russian nationalist and former FOXHOUND agent, Solid Snake's old nemesis, and henchman of Solidus Snake.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Other characters include Emma Emmerich, Otacon's stepsister and a computer whiz-kid; Sergei Gurlukovich, Ocelot's former commanding officer and Olga's father; President James Johnson, held hostage by the Sons of Liberty; and DIA operative Richard Ames. Liquid Snake returns, seemingly by possessing the body of Ocelot. The game also features cameos by Mei Ling, the communications expert who aided Snake in the first game, and Johnny Sasaki, the luckless soldier with chronic digestive problems.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: In 2007, Solid Snake infiltrates a tanker carrying a new Metal Gear model, RAY. The tanker is attacked by Russian mercenaries, led by Colonel Gurlukovich, his daughter Olga, and Ocelot. Ocelot betrays his allies and scuttles the ship. Upon seeing Snake, Ocelot is possessed by the will of Liquid Snake and escapes with RAY.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Two years later, an environmental clean-up facility called the Big Shell has been erected to clear up the oil spill. During a tour by US President James Johnson, the Sons of Liberty raid the facility, take Johnson hostage, and threaten to destroy it. FOXHOUND's Raiden is ordered by the Colonel to rescue the hostages and disarm the terrorists. The surviving members of a responding Navy SEAL team, Iroquois Pliskin and Peter Stillman, help Raiden disable explosives planted by Fatman. A timed bomb goes off, killing Stillman. Raiden kills Fatman and encounters a mysterious cyborg ninja. Raiden and Pliskin arrange to transport hostages via helicopter, but are confronted by Dead Cell's leader identifying as Solid Snake, flying a Harrier. Raiden shoots down the Harrier, but "Solid Snake" escapes with the stolen Metal Gear RAY. Pliskin reveals he is the real Solid Snake and, along with Otacon, helps locate Johnson.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Johnson reveals to Raiden the United States' democratic process is a sham staged by an organization called "the Patriots", who secretly rule the country. Furthermore, the Big Shell is a facade to hide Arsenal Gear, a submersible mobile fortress that houses an AI called "GW". He explains the leader of Dead Cell is his predecessor George Sears, a clone of Big Boss known as Solidus Snake, who plans to seize Arsenal and overthrow the Patriots. Ocelot then kills Johnson.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Raiden rescues computer programmer Emma Emmerich, step-sister of Otacon, who plans to upload a virus into GW to disable Arsenal. Vamp stabs Emma, before being shot by Raiden. Emma uploads the virus, but dies from her injury as the virus is cut off prematurely. Otacon leaves to rescue the hostages while Raiden is captured by the ninja, revealed to be Olga, when Snake seemingly betrays him. Big Shell collapses as Arsenal departs.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Raiden awakens on Arsenal before Solidus who reveals he had murdered Raiden's parents and raised him as a child soldier during the Liberian civil war. Solidus leaves and Olga frees Raiden, explaining she is a Patriot double-agent forced to aid Raiden in exchange for her child's safety. After the Colonel begins acting erratically, Raiden discovers he is a construct of GW, damaged by the virus. Rose tells Raiden she had been ordered by the Patriots to become his lover and spy on him, and that she is pregnant with his child. Raiden finds Snake, who had helped Olga capture Raiden, so they could gain entry to Arsenal. Fortune battles Snake, while Raiden is forced into battle with AI-controlled Metal Gear RAYs. The virus causes the RAYs to malfunction, and Solidus kills Olga when she discloses her double-agent status to protect Raiden.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Snake and Raiden are captured, and taken to the top of Arsenal by Solidus, Fortune, and Ocelot. Ocelot reveals himself to be a Patriot agent and that the entire affair was orchestrated by the Patriots to artificially replicate a soldier (Raiden) on par with Solid Snake, titled the S3 Plan. Ocelot kills Fortune before being possessed again by Liquid Snake. Liquid explains that Ocelot's severed right arm was replaced with his own, and plans to hunt down the Patriots using his host's knowledge and the stolen RAY. Snake pursues Liquid, as Arsenal loses control.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Arsenal crashes into Manhattan. Raiden is contacted by an AI impersonating the Colonel and Rose. It states that GW was the only AI destroyed, and that the S3 Plan's real purpose is to control human thought to prevent society's regression in the digital era from trivial information drowning knowledge and truth. They order Raiden to eliminate Solidus; refusal will result in the deaths of Olga's child and Rose. After Raiden defeats Solidus, Snake appears after tracking Liquid's RAY. Snake and Otacon plan to rescue Olga's child, and locate the Patriots, whose details were hidden in the GW virus disc. Raiden is reunited with the real Rose.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: In the epilogue, having decoded the disc, Otacon and Snake find it contains data on all twelve members of the Patriots' highest council, . However, the members have allegedly been dead for 100 years.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: "Metal Gear Solid 2" is often considered the first example of a postmodern video game and has often been cited as a primary example of artistic expression in video games. The storyline explored many social, philosophical and cyberpunk themes in significant detail, including meme theory, social engineering, sociology, artificial intelligence, information control, fifth-generation warfare, conspiracy theories, political and military maneuvering, evolution, existentialism, censorship, the nature of reality, the Information Age, virtual reality, child exploitation, taboos such as incest, sexual orientation, and the moral dilemma between security and personal liberty. Since its release, the game's themes have been studied and analyzed by numerous writers, journalists, and academics. "MGS2", along with its predecessor, has been featured in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibition, "The Art of Video Games", in 2012.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: In his paper "How Videogames Express Ideas", Matthew Weise of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology described " Sons of Liberty" as "perhaps the most vivid example of a game that uses tension between different levels of player agency to fuel a multi-faceted ideological argument," noting Solidus Snake's suggestion of the United States being a "totalitarian regime of thought control" and pointing to the "very meta concept" of "how the designer’s imposed plan or path for the player maps to the tyrannical nature of the government," where, "like the player, Jack has no agency other than what his puppet masters give him." In the book "Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games", Tanner Higgin examined the game's "resistant and subversive counter-history of military engagement," describing its "convoluted narrative and unconventional gameplay logics" as a "critique" of "the very networks of biopolitical and informational control that comprise the postmodern military, and posthumanity generally," and noting that it "purposefully manufactures frustration and negative affect" to "highlight the typically unexamined codes, conventions, and hidden pleasures of the military game genre."


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com notes that ""Metal Gear Solid 2" is a game built on misinformation" and that it "was simply too avant-garde—too clever—for its own good." Steven Poole commented in a 2012 "Edge" column, "the story of "MGS2", with its mythic wit and sweep, is still in a different league from the vast majority of videogame yarns. ... [H]owever, the fact that "MGS2" still seems so avant-garde today might well prompt a worry: does it represent the pinnacle of a now-vanished era, the age of the experimental mainstream? This was, after all, a big-budget commercial boxed product that gleefully took risks and subverted genre conventions at every turn. Modern blockbuster games play it painfully safe by comparison." "Gamasutra" notes that the game deals with issues concerning the Information Age, and has compared the game's themes to the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The existential themes of the game align with the political philosophy and theses of Isaiah Berlin and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, focusing on the struggle between freedom and equality, and Berlin's concept of the "pursuit of the ideal", as the player's internal conflict of ideals are one of the main driving forces of the plot.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The game is considered to be ahead of its time for dealing with themes and concepts that later became culturally relevant in the 2010s. The game has been described as "profound," particularly the final dialogue scene between Raiden and the AI posing as the Colonel and Rose. In 2011, Dugan Patrick of "Gamasutra" drew comparisons to social media and social gaming, and found that the game predicted elements of Facebook, such as allowing "people to intentionally censor their own experience within the self-curated walls of Facebook." In 2016, Alex Wiltshire of "Glixel" found the game to be "strangely prescient of not only its own time but also today," noting how it dodged "truth at every turn" and comparing it to post-truth politics, Facebook's curated News Feed, and the 2016 United States presidential election. Further comparisons have been drawn to concepts that became mainstream during the 2010s, such as fake news, echo chambers, and alternative facts. According to Cameron Kunzelman of "Vice", "Metal Gear Solid 2" is still politically relevant in 2017. In March 2018, "GamesRadar" drew comparisons to recent political events including the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the investigations involving Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: In 2018, Adrian Mróz published a paper in the academic journal "", where the "idea of Selection for Societal Sanity" from the game is "applied into a philosophical framework based on select concepts from Bernard Stiegler's writing and incorporating them with current events such as post-truth or fake news in order to explore the role of "techne" and filtration within social organizations and individual "psyches"." He notes that, despite being released in an era of neoliberal dominance, the game's themes resonate with current affairs in the late 2010s, such as post-truth, the collapse of political correctness, cognitive dissonance, and "the problem of filtering within a society flooded by information." "IGN" said its "fourth-wall-obliterating final act posed a number of terrifying questions about the overload of data in the information age, and how technology has led to an increasingly shaky definition" of "reality," and has drawn comparisons to deep fakes, machine learning, and information warfare.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The creator Hideo Kojima's original design document for the game was completed in January 1999. The Japanese document was published by Konami in 2002, and translated into English in 2006. It mentioned that the game was originally going to be called "Metal Gear Solid III" to symbolize Manhattan's three tallest skyscrapers." The document outlines new game mechanics and features, such as bodies that need to be hidden, enemies being able to detect shadows, lights in an area that can be destroyed to affect enemy vision, realistic enemy AI that relies on squad tactics rather than working individually, and multi-level environments that add an element of "vertical tension" to the stealth gameplay. It also outlines themes, such as passing on memories, environmental issues, and particularly social themes regarding the "digitization of the military," digital simulations, the "digitization of operational planning," the "digitization of everyday life," and the "effects of digitization on personality." The document stated that the "aim of the story" involves "a series of betrayals and sudden reversals, to the point where the player is unable to tell fact from fiction" (departing from the "very clear and understandable story" of its predecessor), that "every character lies to (betrays) someone once," blurring the line between "what is real, and what is fantasy," and "ironies aimed at the digital society and gaming culture."


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The game's production budget was $10 million, similar to the budget of a Japanese "Godzilla" film. Kojima states that when he "heard about the hardware for the PlayStation 2," he "wanted to try something new. Up to that point, all cutscenes had focused more on details like facial expressions, but I wanted to pay more attention to the surroundings, to see how much I could change them in real time." The game was in development for four years and over 100 people worked on the game.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: For "Metal Gear Solid 2", the established protagonist of Solid Snake was only made playable for the prologue portion of the game. A new protagonist named Raiden would substitute him as the player character for the main portion. The decision to introduce a new protagonist came from the idea of portraying Solid Snake from another character's perspective, but also to get around the dilemma of having to write gameplay tutorials directed at Snake, as Kojima felt that having to explain mission procedures and weapon handling to a veteran soldier like Snake would have felt unnatural after three games in the same continuity. Raiden was also deliberately designed to appeal to female players after the team overheard a pair of female debuggers remark that the more middle-aged protagonist of the original "Metal Gear Solid" was not appealing to them. Raiden's presence in the game was kept a secret before release, with preview trailers showing Snake in situations and battles that occurred to Raiden in the published game, such as a battle against a Harrier on George Washington Bridge and an encounter with the new Cyborg Ninja inside the tanker.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: According to Kojima in the documentary "Metal Gear Saga Vol. 1", the original plot of the game revolved around nuclear weapon inspections in Iraq and Iran and had Solid Snake trying to stop the Metal Gear while it was located on an aircraft carrier, in a certain time limit, while trying to stop Liquid Snake and his group. However, about six months into the project, the political situation in the Middle East became a concern, and they decided that they could not make a game with such a plot. The tanker in the released game is based on this original plot.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: "MGS2" was also intended to reference the novel "City of Glass", notably in the naming of its characters. Raiden's support team originally featured a different field commander named Colonel Daniel Quinn; Maxine "Max" Work, an Asian woman who saves game data and quotes Shakespeare, and William "Doc" Wilson, the creator of GW. All take their names from key characters in the book, and all three would have turned out to be AIs. None of these characters survived to the final edition, their roles being absorbed by other characters, namely the "Colonel Campbell" simulation, Rose, and Emma Emmerich. Peter Stillman, however, takes his name from another "City of Glass" character.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: A character named Chinaman, originally planned to be included as a villain, was later on omitted and his abilities incorporated in Vamp, namely the ability to walk on water and walls. Chinaman would have movements modeled after Jet Li and have a body tattoo of a dragon that would come alive as soon as he dove into the water.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Significant changes to the game's ending were made late in development following the September 11 attacks in New York, where the finale occurs. A sequence depicting Arsenal Gear's displacement of the Statue of Liberty and crashing through half of Manhattan was removed, as was a short coda to appear after the credits, a breaking newscast showing the Statue of Liberty's new resting place, Ellis Island. At the point where Solidus dies, Raiden was supposed to have cut the rope on Federal Hall's flagpole, causing an American flag to fall over Solidus' body, and American flags that were supposed to be on all the flagpoles in New York were removed from the title. The Japanese spelling of the name "Raiden" was changed from katakana (ライデン) to kanji (雷電) due to the former form of the name resembling "Bin Laden" in Japanese.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Kojima's choice of composer for "Metal Gear Solid 2" was highly publicized in the run-up to the game's release, with him deciding upon Harry Gregson-Williams, a film composer from Hans Zimmer's studio, after watching "The Replacement Killers" with sound director Kazuki Muraoka. A mix CD containing 18 tracks of Gregson-Williams' work was sent to his office. Flattered by the research put into creating the CD (as some of the tracks were unreleased, and that what tracks he'd worked on for some films were undocumented), he joined the project soon after.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: To bypass the language barrier and allow the score to be developed before the cutscenes were finalized, Gregson-Williams was sent short phrases or descriptions of the intended action. The resultant themes then shaped the action sequences in return. Gregson-Williams also arranged and re-orchestrated the original ""Metal Gear Solid" Main Theme" for use in the game's opening title sequence.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Norihiko Hibino, who had worked on previous Konami games such as "Metal Gear: Ghost Babel", was responsible for the in-game music. He also worked on the majority of the game's cutscenes, re-orchestrating Gregson-Williams' "Main Theme" remix for use in several sequences.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: As with "Metal Gear Solid", the cutscene music includes orchestral and choir pieces, while the in-game soundtrack is scored with ambient music. However, the score as a whole incorporates more electronic elements (particularly breakbeat) than its predecessor, to reflect the plot's thematic thrust of a machine-dominated society. Rika Muranaka again provided a vocal ending theme, a jazz track entitled "Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday," sung by Carla White. The game's music was released via four CDs: "", "", "" and "".


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The game's main theme was chosen by the London Philharmonic Orchestra for their "Greatest Video Game Music" compilation, and the theme is a key regular in the "Video Games Live" concert when the "Metal Gear Solid" segment is introduced. A segment of the song's main chorus is included in the closing sequence of "".


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: In contrast to the original "Metal Gear Solid", "Sons of Liberty" was released in North America first, on November 13, 2001. Because of the later release in the region, the protagonist switch was not kept a secret in the Japanese version in the weeks before its release. A preview event was held in Zepp Tokyo on the day of the game's North American release in which the character of Raiden was unveiled to the Japanese public. As a result, the Japanese packaging artwork depicts Raiden standing prominently next to Solid Snake, as opposed to only having Snake like on the cover artwork used for the American (and later European) version. A questionnaire was also added in the Japanese version, in which players are asked about their experience with the original "Metal Gear Solid" and action games in general; the answers to the questionnaire determines the difficulty level of the game and whether the player starts the game on the Tanker chapter or skips directly to the Plant chapter (an option that is only available after clearing the game once in the American version). The Japanese version has a few other additional features over the American version, including two extra game modes unlocked after completing the main game: Boss Survival, in which the player replays through the boss battles from the main game as either, Snake or Raiden; and Casting Theater, in which the player can view certain cutscenes from the main game and replace the character models.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The Japanese version was released on November 29, two weeks after the American version. As with the original "Metal Gear Solid", "Sons of Liberty" was sold in a limited "Premium Package" edition in addition to the standard release, which was packaged in a black box containing the game itself with a reversible cover art on the DVD case (with Snake on one side and Raiden on the other), a video DVD known as the "Premium Disc", which features a collection of "Metal Gear Solid"-related commercials and trailers, a metallic Solid Snake figurine, and an 80-page booklet titled "Metal Gear Chronicle" featuring artwork and commentary about the series.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The European version, which was initially scheduled for February 22, 2002, was released on March 8, nearly four months after the other regions. The added features from the Japanese release were carried over to the European version, along with a new difficulty setting (European Extreme). The European version came packaged with a video DVD titled "The Making of Metal Gear Solid 2". As well as collating all of the game's promotional trailers and a GameSpot feature on the game's final days of development, it features a titular documentary produced by French television production house FunTV, which was filmed at KCE Japan West's Japanese studio. The DVD was included as an apology to European consumers for the several months delay that had occurred since the original November release in North America and Japan, which saw numerous European gaming magazines detail the various twists in the game.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: "Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance", the expanded edition of the game, was released on the original Xbox and Windows in addition to the PlayStation 2. The Xbox version was initially released in North America as a timed exclusive for the console on November 5, 2002. This was followed by the PlayStation 2 version, released in Japan on December 19 of the same year. "Substance" was eventually released on PlayStation 2 and Windows in North America and on all three platforms in Europe in March 2003. The console versions were developed internally by KCE Japan, whereas the Windows port was outsourced to Success.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: "Substance" contains several supplemental game modes in addition to the main story mode from the original "Sons of Liberty" releases. The main game contains all the changes and additions that were made in the Japanese and European versions of the original release (e.g., Boss Survival, Casting Theater, European Extreme), along with further additional changes. Players can now start the main story mode at the Tanker or Plant chapters without the need to answer a questionnaire first, and a new set of collectible dog tags have been added (exclusively on the PlayStation 2 version) based on names submitted from a second contest in addition to the original (2001) set. The visual effect for the thermal goggles was also changed in "Substance", and the "FHM"-licensed posters that adorned several locations in the original "Sons of Liberty" version have been replaced with public domain images (these were also replaced in "The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2"). The Xbox and Windows versions feature slight dialogue changes during specific control explanations in which the term "analog stick" was substituted with "thumbstick" (Microsoft's preferred term). The controls were also slightly altered for the Xbox version, due to its fewer shoulder buttons (clicking on the left thumbstick switches between normal and first-person view, while the Y button serves as a lock-on for the player's aim). The Xbox version has support for 5.1 surround sound.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The primary addition of "Substance" is the inclusion of an extra missions mode with 350 VR missions set in a computer-constructed environment and 150 "Alternative" missions set in areas from the main story. The player can choose to play these missions as Solid Snake or Raiden, with alternate versions of both characters (in different outfits) becoming available as the player progresses. These missions are divided into eight categories (although not all of them are available to every character): Sneaking, Weapon, First Person View (which simulates a first-person shooter), Variety, Hold Up, Bomb Disposal, Elimination, and Photograph.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The other new addition is "Snake Tales", which is a set of five story-based missions featuring Solid Snake as the player character. These missions are primarily set in the Big Shell and involve characters from the main story in new roles such as Fatman, Emma, Vamp and Solidus Snake, while one mission set in the Tanker features Meryl Silverburgh. These missions, which are unrelated to the main campaign and are non-canonical, have no voice-acted cutscenes - instead, the story is told through text-only interludes.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Exclusive to the PlayStation 2 version is a skateboarding minigame in which the player control Snake or Raiden in a pair of Big Shell-themed levels. The player has to complete a set of objectives before time runs out, which range from collecting dog tags scattered throughout the level to blowing up parts of Big Shell. The minigame uses the same engine from "Evolution Skateboarding", which was developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Osaka.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: "Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty - HD Edition" was released on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2011 and for the PlayStation Vita in 2012. This version is included in the "Metal Gear Solid HD Collection" but is also available as a digital download on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade. The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions feature an increased 720p resolution and a aspect ratio, providing a clearer and wider view of the player's surroundings compared to the original 480p resolution and ratio of the PlayStation 2 version, while the PS Vita version runs at qHD resolution. Cutscenes can now be viewed in fullscreen or letterboxed format, while online achievements/trophies have been added as well. Most of the additional content from "Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance" has also been ported in this version, such as the Missions and Snake Tales modes, although the Skateboarding minigame that was present in the PlayStation 2 version of "Substance" is absent. The PS3 and Vita versions have a "transfarring" option that allows players to transfer save data between both versions through a Wi-Fi connection or a cloud network. The Vita version has touchscreen and touchpad support for certain gameplay functions such as switching between items and weapons or zooming into cutscenes.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2 is an interactive documentary developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Japan and published by Konami, originally released in September, 2002. The game covers the development of "Metal Gear Solid 2" in great detail, containing internal material developed during the production of "Sons of Liberty".


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: It includes 3D models of characters, scenery, and objects that were used in the game (as well as unused assets), along with corresponding concept art when available. All the real-time cutscenes (or polygon demos) are also available to view (without audio), with the option to pause them at any point, change the camera angle and move them frame by frame. Other content includes storyboards, behind-the-scenes footage, preview trailers, music tracks (with the option to play alternate patterns when applicable), the finalized screenplay, Hideo Kojima's original draft (available in Japanese only), a development timeline, and a gallery of "Metal Gear Solid" related products and merchandise.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The disc also includes a few VR training missions that were later featured in "Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance". In Europe, the disc was bundled with the PlayStation 2 version of "Substance" instead of having a stand-alone release. It was also included in the Japanese 20th Anniversary re-release of "Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty" in July 2007.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: IDW Publishing published a 12-issue comic book adaptation from 2006 to 2007, titled "Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty", illustrated by Ashley Wood (who also worked on the comic book adaptation of the previous game) and written by Alex Garner. This version deviates from the game, where many scenes involving Raiden are substituted with Snake.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: A digital version of the comic, titled "Metal Gear Solid 2: Bande Dessinée", was released on June 12, 2008, in Japan. Originally announced as a PlayStation Portable game, similar to the "", the digital comic was released as a DVD film instead. A fully voiced version of the graphic novel adaptation of the first "Metal Gear Solid" is featured as well.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: A novelization of the game written by Raymond Benson and published by Del Rey. The American paperback edition was published on November 24, 2009. A majority of the character interaction in the novel is taken verbatim from the Codec conversations in the game itself.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: A second novelization by Kenji Yano (written under the pen name Hitori Nojima), titled "Metal Gear Solid Substance II", was published by Kadokawa Shoten in Japan on September 24, 2015. This novelization is narrated in real-time during the events of the Plant chapter from the perspective of a young man living in Manhattan.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: As a result of promising trailers and the enormous commercial success of its predecessor "Metal Gear Solid", there was a high level of anticipation in the gaming community surrounding the release of "Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty". The game's E3 2000 demo surprised many spectators with its level of realism and played a vital role in the PlayStation 2 console's early success. It was the most anticipated game for the PlayStation 2 in 2001.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: In Japan, the game sold 400,000 units in its first day, in addition to its 600,000 pre-orders in the country. In the United States, the game sold 500,000 units within two days of release, and 680,000 copies within five. It was the top-selling game in November 2001, with units sold, and topped the video game rental chart the same month. It went on to be one of the top four best-selling games of 2001 in the United States. By July 2006, it had sold 2 million copies and earned in the United States alone. "Next Generation" ranked it as the 16th highest-selling game launched for the PlayStation 2, Xbox or GameCube between January 2000 and July 2006 in the country.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: In Europe, the game received pre-orders, surpassing Konami's initial expectations of units. In the United Kingdom, it set a fastest sales record with 200,000 copies sold and or grossed within three days. The PlayStation 2 version received a "Platinum" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), indicating sales of at least 300,000 copies in the United Kingdom. It also received a Platinum Award in Germany for sales above 200,000 units in the country.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Worldwide, the game had sold over units by 2003. , the original release had sold and "Substance" had sold for a combined units sold worldwide, making it the highest-selling game in the series.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: "Metal Gear Solid 2" received "universal acclaim" according to review aggregator Metacritic, where it is one of the highest-rated games on the website, and remains the highest-rated exclusive on the PlayStation 2. "Game Informer" gave the game a score of 10/10, while GameSpot gave the game a 9.6 rating, stating, "It boils down to this: You must play "Metal Gear Solid 2"." Critics praised the title's stealth gameplay and the improvements over its predecessor, as well as the game's level of graphical detail, particularly in the use of in-game graphics to render plot-driving cutscenes.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: The title's storyline, however, was initially divisive and became the source of controversy. Hideo Kojima's ambitious script received praise for exploring numerous social, philosophical, and cyberpunk themes in significant detail, and it has often been called the first example of a postmodern video game. However, some critics considered the plot to be "incomprehensible" and overly cumbersome for an action game, and also felt that the lengthy dialogue sections heavily disrupted the gameplay and that the dialogue itself was overly disjointed and convoluted. The surprise introduction of Raiden as the protagonist for the majority of the game (replacing long-time series protagonist Solid Snake) was also controversial with fans of "Metal Gear Solid".


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Blake Fischer reviewed the PlayStation 2 version of the game for "Next Generation", rating it five stars out of five, and stated that ""MGS2" is everything we hoped it would be, and more. Great action, an enthralling story, and plenty of surprises makes this "the" PS2 game to get this holiday season."


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: "GameSpot" named "Metal Gear Solid 2" the fourth-best console game of 2001, and presented the game with its annual "Best Music" and "Biggest Surprise" awards among console games. It was nominated in the publication's "Best PlayStation 2 Game", "Best Sound", "Best Story", "Best Graphics, Technical", "Best Graphics, Artistic" and "Best In-Game Water" award categories.


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: In a 2006 viewer poll conducted by Japan's "Famitsu" magazine of top 100 games of all time, "Metal Gear Solid 2" was ranked at No. 42 in the poll. In the 200th issue of "Game Informer Magazine" in 2009, its list of top 200 games of all time ranked the game at No. 50 on the list. "Metal Gear Solid 2" was ranked No. 7 in "Game Informer"s 2008 list of the top ten video game openings. In 2010, GamesRadar included the game in its list of top seven games "with mega plot twists you never saw coming." The game was included in Tony Mott and Peter Molyneux's 2011 book "1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die". It has also been listed as one of the best games of all time by "Electronic Gaming Monthly", "Empire", GameFAQs, GameRankings, IGN, Metacritic, "Slant", and "Stuff".


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: According to John Linneman of "Digital Foundry", the game was a technical milestone for its time. It served as a killer app showcasing what the PlayStation 2 hardware was capable of, with the game setting "a new standard in cinematic presentation" and attention to detail, and demonstrating "huge numbers of enemies on screen with bodies that remain in the scene, the interaction of light and shadow, physics interactions with real world objects, multi-tiered environments and advanced enemy AI." This made possible new "gameplay opportunities" and a sense of freedom offered by levels "designed as mini-sandboxes with a tremendous amount of interactivity." The early anticipation that surrounded "Metal Gear Solid 2" since its E3 2000 demo has been credited as a critical factor in the PlayStation 2's best-selling success and dominance during the sixth console generation, as well as the demise of Sega's Dreamcast. According to John Szczepaniak, ""MGS2" was the game which single-handedly sold Sony's new PlayStation 2 to the masses."


title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: In 2009, "Wired" included the game in its list of "The 15 Most Influential Games of the Decade" at No. 13, concluding that every "videogame story that subverts a player's expectations owes a debt to the ground broken by "Metal Gear Solid 2"." The artistic influence of "Metal Gear Solid 2" can be seen in later video games such as Goichi Suda's similarly postmodern game "Killer7", the similarly metanarrative game "Portal", the survival horror title "", and particularly the first-person shooter "BioShock", which featured a similar plot twist to "Metal Gear Solid 2". Several game mechanics developed in "Metal Gear Solid 2", such as the cover system and laser sight mechanic, have since become staples of stealth games as well as shooters, including "Kill Switch" (2003), "Resident Evil 4" (2005) and "Gears of War" (2006). The reveal of "Metal Gear Solid 2" also led to the development of "Splinter Cell", which Ubisoft originally intended to be "a "Metal Gear Solid 2" killer." According to Kojima, "Metal Gear Solid 2" paid more "attention to the surroundings" in real-time and later "games like "Call of Duty" have followed this trend of making your surroundings more realistic." Neil Druckmann cited the revelation of Raiden in "Metal Gear Solid 2" as an inspiration for the bold surprise in "The Last of Us Part II" (2020). In a 20-year retrospective, Christian Smith of "Collider" said that "Metal Gear Solid 2" remains a "controversial masterpiece" that played a pivotal role in "redefining the art of making video games after the turn of the millennium".


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: Moonlighting is an American comedy drama television series that aired on ABC from March 3, 1985, to May 14, 1989. The network aired a total of 67 episodes. Starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis as private detectives, and Allyce Beasley as their quirky receptionist, the show was a mixture of drama, comedy, mystery, and romance, and was considered to be one of the first successful and influential examples of comedy drama, or "dramedy", emerging as a distinct television genre.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: The show's theme song was co-written and performed by jazz singer Al Jarreau and became a hit. The show is also credited with making Willis a star and relaunching Shepherd's career after a string of lackluster projects. In 1997, the episode "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice" was ranked #34 on (the 1997) TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time. In 2007, the series was listed as one of "Time" magazine's "100 Best TV Shows of All-"Time"". The relationship between the characters David and Maddie was included in "TV Guide"s list of the best TV couples of all time.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: The series revolved around cases investigated by the Blue Moon Detective Agency and its two partners, Madolyn "Maddie" Hayes (Shepherd) and David Addison Jr. (Willis). The show, with a mix of mystery, sharp dialogue, and sexual tension between its leads, introduced Willis to the world and brought Shepherd back into the spotlight after a nearly decade-long absence. The characters were introduced in a two-hour pilot episode.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: The show's storyline begins with the reversal of fortune of Maddie Hayes, a former model who finds herself bankrupt after her accountant embezzles all her liquid assets. She is left saddled with several failing businesses formerly maintained as tax writeoffs, one of which is the City of Angels Detective Agency, helmed by the carefree David Addison. Between the pilot and the first one-hour episode, David persuades Maddie to keep the business and run it as a partnership. The agency is renamed Blue Moon Investigations because Maddie was most famous for being the spokesmodel for the Blue Moon Shampoo Company. In many episodes, she was recognized as "the Blue Moon shampoo girl," if not by name.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: In his audio commentary for the Season 3 DVD, creator Glenn Gordon Caron says that the inspiration for the series was a production of "The Taming of the Shrew" he saw in Central Park starring Meryl Streep and Raúl Julia. The show parodied the play in the Season 3 episode "Atomic Shakespeare".


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: In addition to the primary cast, several notable actors appeared either as guest stars or made cameos on the series.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: The series was created by Glenn Gordon Caron, one of the producers of the similar "Remington Steele", when he was approached by ABC executive Lewis H. Erlicht. Erlicht liked the work Caron had done on "Taxi" and "Remington Steele" and wanted a detective show featuring a major star in a leading role who would appeal to an upscale audience. Caron wanted to do a romance, to which Erlicht replied “I don’t care what it is, as long as it’s a detective show.”


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: The tone of the series was left up to the production staff, resulting in "Moonlighting" becoming one of the first successful TV "dramedies"— dramatic-comedy, a style of television and movies in which there is an equal or nearly equal balance of humor and serious content. The show made use of fast-paced, overlapping dialogue between the two leads, harking back to classic screwball comedy films such as those of director Howard Hawks. These innovative qualities resulted in its being nominated, for the first time in the 50-year history of the Directors Guild of America, for both Best Drama and Best Comedy in the same year (both in 1985 and 1986).


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: "Moonlighting" frequently broke the fourth wall, with many episodes including dialogue that made direct references to the scriptwriters, the audience, the network, or the series itself. (For example, when a woman is trying to commit suicide by jumping into a bathtub with a television playing "The Three Stooges", Addison says, "The Stooges? Are you nuts? The network'll never let you do that, lady!")


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: Cold opens sometimes featured Shepherd and Willis (in character as Maddie Hayes and David Addison), other actors, viewers, or TV critics directly addressing the audience about the show's production itself. These cold opens were originally borne out of desperation as a way to fill air time, since the dialogue on the show was spoken so quickly and the producers needed something to fill the entire hour. In some episodes, the production crew and sets become involved in the plot.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: The series also embraced fantasy; in season two, the show aired "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice," an episode that features two lengthy and elaborately produced black-and-white dream sequences. David and Maddie are told about a murder that occurred in the 1940s by the inheritor of the then-famous nightclub where the murder took place. Maddie and David feud over whether the man or woman who was executed for the crime was the real murderer. The two dream sequences present each detective's version of how the murder took place. They were filmed on black-and-white film stock so that they would look like true period films. (On the commentary on the DVD, it is said that they used black-and-white film instead of color so that the network would not later use the color film.)


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: Fearing fan reaction to a popular show being shown in black and white, ABC demanded a disclaimer be made at the beginning of the episode to inform viewers of the "black-and-white" gimmick for the episode. The show's producers hired Orson Welles to deliver the introduction, which aired a few days after the actor's death.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: "Atomic Shakespeare" features the cast performing a variation of "The Taming of the Shrew", with David in the role of Petruchio, Maddie as Katharina, Agnes as Bianca, and Herbert as Lucentio. The episode features Shakespearean costumes and mixed the plot with humorous anachronisms and variations on "Moonlighting"'s own running gags. The characters perform the dialogue in iambic pentameter, and the episode is wrapped by segments featuring a boy imagining the episode's proceedings because his mother forced him to do his Shakespeare homework instead of watching "Moonlighting".


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: In addition, the show mocked its connection to the "Remington Steele" series by having Pierce Brosnan hop networks and make a cameo appearance as Steele in one episode. The show also acknowledged "Hart to Hart" as an influence: in the episode "It's a Wonderful Job," based on the film "It's a Wonderful Life", Maddie's guardian angel showed her an alternate reality in which Jonathan and Jennifer Hart from the earlier series had taken over Blue Moon's lease. Although Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers did not appear in the episode, Lionel Stander reprised his role as the Harts' assistant Max.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: Both Shepherd and Willis sang musical numbers over the course of the show. In "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice," Shepherd performed both "Blue Moon" in Maddie's dream sequence and "I Told Ya I Love Ya, Now Get Out" in David's, while in "Atomic Shakespeare," Willis sings The Young Rascals' "Good Lovin'". Willis also frequently broke into shorter snippets of Motown songs. "Good Lovin'," "Blue Moon", and "I Told Ya I Love Ya..." appeared on the Moonlighting Soundtrack.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: The episode "Big Man on Mulberry Street" centers around a production dance number set to the Billy Joel song of the same name. The sequence was directed by musical director Stanley Donen.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: "Moonlighting" was unusual at the time for being one of only three shows, due to FCC regulations limiting the practice, to be owned and produced in-house by a broadcast network (NBC’s "Punky Brewster" and CBS’s "Twilight Zone" revival being the others). This allowed the network greater flexibility in budgeting the show since the “back-end potential” for profits was so much greater with not having to pay a licensing fee to the film studio or independent production company. As a result, ABC gave Caron a lot of control over production. Caron, however, was a perfectionist and viewed "Moonlighting" as the filming of a one-hour movie every week, using techniques usually reserved for big budget films. To capture the cinematic feel of the films of the 1940s, for example, he would prohibit the use of a zoom lens, opting instead to use more time-consuming moving master cameras that move back and forth on a track and require constant resetting of the lights. Diffusion disks were used to soften Cybill Shepherd's features, and a special lens needed to be employed so that in a two shot, Maddie would be diffused and David would not.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: Much of the credit for this look and feel can be attributed to the hiring of Gerald Finnerman as the director of photography. Finnerman, a second-generation cinematographer, was brought up in the old school of cinematography by working with his father, Perry Finnerman, and later as a camera operator for Harry Stradling on such films as "My Fair Lady" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray". Finnerman would then go on to be the director of photography for the TV series "" and was responsible for creating much of the mood in that show by employing black-and-white lighting techniques for color film. This background meshed perfectly with what Caron was trying to portray in the series and earned him an Emmy nomination for the black-and-white episode “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice”. Hired for the show after the pilot was shot, Finnerman would become involved in virtually every aspect of the show including the scripts, lighting, set design, and even directing some of the later episodes.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: Typical scripts for an average one-hour television show run 60 pages, but those for "Moonlighting" were nearly twice as long due to the fast talking overlapping dialogue of the main characters. While the average television show would take seven days to shoot, "Moonlighting" would take from 12 to 14 days to complete with episodes and dialogue frequently being written by Caron the same day they were shot. This attention to detail contributed to "Moonlighting" as being one of the most expensive television shows being produced at the time. Where most episodes would cost around $900,000 to produce, "Moonlighting" was running nearly double that. The season 2 episode "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice" could have been filmed much more cheaply by being shot in color and then decolorized, but Caron insisted on the authentic look of black-and-white film which took 16 days to shoot, bringing the cost of the episode to the then-unheard-of sum of two million dollars. Caron often defended his filming practices in the name of giving the audience what they wanted and producing a quality product. He used the following analogy to illustrate the point, "The thinking in television which makes no damn sense to me, is that a half hour of television costs X, and an hour of television costs Y, no matter what that television is, it strikes me as an insane hypothesis. The parallel is, you're hungry, whether you go to McDonald's or whether you go to '21,' it should cost the same; they both fill your stomach. It's nonsense."


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: All of this attention to detail resulted in production delays and the show became notorious for airing reruns when new episodes had not been completed in time for broadcast. The first two seasons of "Moonlighting" focused almost entirely on the two main characters, having them appear in almost every scene. According to Cybill Shepherd, "I left home at 5 A.M. each day. "Moonlighting" scripts were close to a hundred pages, half again as long as the average one-hour television series. Almost from the moment the cameras started rolling we were behind schedule, sometimes completing as few as sixteen episodes per season, and never achieving the standard twenty-two."


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: "I don't mean to paint her as the sole bearer of responsibility for the discord. But if I said to you, 'You're going to have a great new job – it's a life-defining job – but you're going to work 14–15 hours a day, and by the way, you'll never know what hours those are – sometimes you'll start at noon and work until 3 a.m., other times you won't know when or where it will be [until the last minute].' It can be very difficult, it requires an amazing amount of stamina. It's easier to do if you're still reaching for the stars, it's a lot tougher if you're already a star, if you've already reached the top of the mountain."


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: "Well, I was the guy that more often than not would be the one that would go into the lions den when they were having disagreements. I'd sort of be the referee, try to resolve it so that we could get back to work. So there was that side of it. Everybody knows there was friction between the two of them on the stage. In the beginning, Bruce was just a guy’s guy. Let's just say he evolved. Over the years, he went from being the crew's best friend and just being grateful for the work and all of that to realizing that he was going to be a movie star and wanting to move on. Part of that was because of his strained relationship with Cybill. That sometimes made the set a very unpleasant place to be. Cybill – I got along with her very well at times, other times I’d have to be the one who said you have to come out of the trailer and go to work. In fairness to her, she was in the makeup chair at six thirty in the morning with pages of dialogue she hadn’t seen before, she'd work very long hours, and then be back in the makeup chair at six thirty the next morning."


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: The delays became so great that even ABC mocked the lateness with an ad campaign showing network executives waiting impatiently for the arrival of new episodes at ABC's corporate headquarters. One episode featured television critic Jeff Jarvis in an introduction, sarcastically reminding viewers what was going on with the show's plot since it had been so long since the last new episode.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: The season three clipshow episode "The Straight Poop" also made fun of the episode delays by having Hollywood columnist Rona Barrett drop by the Blue Moon Detective Agency to figure out why David and Maddie couldn't get along, as the premise to set up the clips from earlier episodes. In the end, Rona convinced them to apologize to one another, and promised the viewers that there would be an all-new episode the following week.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: Shepherd's real-life pregnancy and a skiing accident in which Willis broke his clavicle further contributed to production delays. To counter these problems, with the fourth season, the writers began to focus more of the show's attention on supporting cast members Agnes and Herbert, writing several episodes focusing on the two so that the show would be able to have episodes ready for airing.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: "Moonlighting" was a hit with TV audiences as well as with critics and industry insiders, with 16 Emmy nominations for the second season which saw "Moonlighting" tie for 20th place in the Nielsen ratings. In season three, the show peaked at 9th, then dropped off slightly to tie for 12th in the 4th season. By the end of the final season, the show was 49th in the ratings.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: The show's ratings decline is popularly attributed to Episode #14 of Season 3, "I Am Curious… Maddie", which infamously had Maddie and David consummate their relationship after two and a half years of romantic tension. In commentaries on the third season DVD set, Caron disputed that the event led to the show's decline, but that a number of other factors led to the series' decline and eventual cancellation. In the fourth season, Willis and Shepherd had scant screen time together. Jay Daniel explained that: Bruce Willis was filming "Die Hard" during this period. When the film became a blockbuster, a film career beckoned and his desire to continue in a weekly series waned. In a series that depended on the chemistry between the two main stars, not having them together for the bulk of the fourth season hurt the ratings.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: The series lost Glenn Gordon Caron as executive producer and head writer when he left the show over difficulties with the production: Shepherd recalled Caron left the show stating that it was either him or her, and he did not think the network would choose him.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: When Maddie returned to Los Angeles near the end of the fourth season, the writers tried to recreate the tension between Maddie and David by having Maddie spontaneously marry a man named Walter Bishop (Dennis Dugan) within a few hours of meeting him on the train back to Los Angeles. When Shepherd read the script, she strongly voiced her objection that her character would not do such a thing, but was overruled. The move failed to rekindle the sparks between the main characters or capture the interest of the audience, which led to an even further ratings decline.


title: Moonlighting (TV series)

text: Neither of the principal stars was fully committed to the final season of the show. Bruce Willis, fresh from his "Die Hard" success, wanted to make more films. Cybill Shepherd, having just given birth to twins, had grown tired of the long, grueling production days and was ready for the series to end.