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A Konami PR representative shot down Hideo Kojima’s claim that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a single game that would encompass “Ground Zeroes” and “The Phantom Pain” in a statement last night. This morning, a different Konami representative, speaking to CVG, has clarified further.

According to this representative, “Metal Gear Solid V” is a concept represented by two games: The Phantom Pain and Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. As previously stated, Ground Zeroes is the prologue to the game’s main narrative, which will be told in The Phantom Pain. But as a prologue, it’ll be “distributed differently” from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, which is being developed as a disc-based game for the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Ground Zeroes is also in development for the PS3 and Xbox 360, but what form it will take when it’s finally released… digital download, separate disc, or some combination of the two… wasn’t made clear.

This jives nicely with Kojima’s desire to create “pilot episodes” to get players interested and engaged in his future games.

OK, this is getting ridiculous. Siliconera has contacted Konami to get to the bottom of the Metal Gear Solid 5/The Phantom Pain/Ground Zeroes mess and to figure out how many new Metal Gear Solid games are actually in development. The answer they got may surprise you.

Jay Boor, Konami’s Director of Public Relations, said: “Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain are two separate games. GZ will be a prologue to The Phantom Pain.”

That seems to contradict what Hideo Kojima said earlier this morning when he stated that “Ground Zeroes” is the tutorial that leads to the nine-year time skip before “The Phantom Pain” in Metal Gear Solid V.

I take it back, this whole situation isn’t almost as absurd as the plot of your average Metal Gear Solid game, it’s worse.

Konami has released the full trailer for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain that Hideo Kojima unveiled this morning at the Game Developers Conference. Set to the strains of Garbage’s “Not Your Kind of People,” the trailer confirms that Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes isn’t a separate game. Instead, that game appears to have been combined with The Phantom Pain to form Metal Gear Solid V.

So we started with two games (Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid 5). Then we added a third game that seemed to share some similarities with the Metal Gear series, but which was said to be an original game (The Phantom Pain). Then comes the big twist where it was revealed that all three were the same game all along. That’s almost as topsy-turvy as the plot to your average Metal Gear Solid game.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is in development for the PS3 and Xbox 360. It doesn’t currently have a release date, but who knows what will happen next.