>I hope the next game comes out in my lifetime.
The first three Metal Slugs were developed by Nazca Corporation, a team that was unofficially formed out of Irem employees, one of SNK's partner studios.
Its developers disbanded after MS3, and out of all of them, only two people openly identified themselves as being part of the original team. Since all the other devs used pseudonyms instead of their actual names in the games' credit sequences due to prohibitive 90's japan vidya laws, they all vanished from the map, and to this day nobody knows who they are. From MS4 onward, Metal Slug was developed by many different teams, none of who could provide the same quality or feeling the first three games had, hence why so many assets are reused. Hardly, if ever, do we see new spritework in any MS game after 3 for this exact reason.
If you ask anyone who created Metal Slug, they'll say it was SNK. So little do people know who actually did it, not even Nazca's logo can be found anywhere in the games save for the ending credits. Not even the internet can give you that answer. They were essentially forgotten. Metal Slug as we know and love was made by a very obscure developing team comprised almost entirely of anonymous people who disappeared from history, seventeen years ago.
And it's never coming back.