In a newly resurfaced 1999 interview with Hideo Kojima, he gives us the inside scoop about the early days of his time with Metal Gear developer Konami.
Posted online by Shmupulations, the interview, originally published by Nice Games, reveals a lot about Kojima’s ambitions and the challenges he faced making Metal Gear. By the time Kojima joined, Konami was two years into making a war game that wasn’t going anywhere.
“That was how the project came to me,” he explains. “What I was fixated on making, in the scope of a ‘war’ game, was an escape game. You know that old movie, The Great Escape? I thought it would be awesome to make a game built around a concept like that, of trying to escape from somewhere. But when I told the senior devs on the team about my idea, they were very dismissive: ‘There’s no games like that.’ I was still a new planner at Konami, so I guess no one was inclined to listen to what I had to say… there was just zero motivation from the start. It was like, what do I have to do here, do I have to start beating people up?”
Fortunately, it didn’t come to blows. The situation did devolve into “passive-aggressive resistance,” but an older employee took a shine to his ideas and the project “was finally able to start moving in a positive direction.”
Kojima says the team still wasn’t fully sold on his idea until they saw the iconic exclamation mark appear above an enemy’s head when they were surprised in a working build of the game. “That sold them on the concept.”
As everyone knows, he’s a huge movie fan, even noting The Great Escape as an inspiration for Metal Gear, so why didn’t he get into the film industry? “The film industry in Japan is very closed off, and no one will give you money to finance a movie,” he says. “Even if you get hired by a studio like Toho, you won’t be permitted to direct anything for a while. I guess that’s to be expected, but I’m not the kind of person who can be content in a servile role like that.”
After a stint writing fiction, he thought he’d have to get a “normal job,” something every writer can relate to, but then he started to play the Famicom and realized games were potent vehicles for storytelling, too.
“As I became familiar with the different games, I started to become more interested,” he remembers. “It was like, ‘ah hah, there’s a whole world here to explore too.’ What made up my mind to get into this industry myself was Super Mario Bros. and The Portopia Serial Murder Case. They weren’t the ‘bleep bloop’ games of old; these games had their own worlds and stories. I felt a certain authorial quality in them.”
Kojima says at the time he lived in the Hyōgo Prefecture, which bordered Osaka, where Konami first started as a jukebox rental and repair company, so the company was a good fit for him. The rest is history, and now he gets to make some of the most cinematic games out there and regularly meets with the brightest up-and-coming movie stars of the moment.
If you’re a fan of the man, check out our list of all the upcoming Hideo Kojima games.
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