Crab Battle

Submission 11,209

Part of a series on Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. [View Related Entries]

About

Crab Battle is the name of a well-known animated parody of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater in which Snake gets in a fight with a crab. Since the animation was first uploaded in 2005 to Newgrounds, it has gained millions of views and been referenced numerous times across social media.

Origin

On May 24th, 2005, Newgrounds user Christopher Boe posted a flash animation called "MGS 3: Crab Battle" to the site.^[1] It was featured on the site that day and gained over 1.9 million views on the platform in nearly sixteen years. On April 18th, 2006, it was uploaded to YouTube by user Aaron Hardbarger, gaining over 2.5 million views in nearly fifteen years (shown below).

Spread

The video quickly became popular across the internet. A definition for "Crab Battle" was added to Urban Dictionary^[2] on May 29th, 2005, five days after the video was published (shown below).

It also became a common reference in image macros and video parodies of crabs looking intimidating or holding weapons. Several image macros captioned "Crab Battle" have appeared on Cheezburger. ^[3]^[4]

On July 13th, 2016, Tumblr user dragonmuses^[5] posted a parody of Crab Battle by playing Metal Gear music over a video of a crab with a knife, gaining over 100,000 notes (shown below).