Hideo Kojima’s two great loves are scanning celebrities and just, like, saying things, man. He indulged the first of those to great effect in the making of Death Stranding 2, and now he’s hit the interview circuit to indulge the latter. Do you know he could kill you? Like literally murder you stone-dead? He’s a man on the edge, you know.
Kojima revealed his extensive training in the art of assassination in a recent chat with Ssense (via GamesRadar), where he also touched on his attitude towards modern big-budget game development, dismantling guns, and whether he’s gonna play that upcoming Metal Gear Solid 3 remake (he’s not).
The founding father of both Death Stranding and Metal Gear is a tad gloomy about non-indie development, it turns out. He says that, watching the parade of trailers at Big Geoff’s Summer Game Fest, he felt like he was seeing the same thing over and over: “Even the visuals and the systems are pretty much the same, and a lot of people enjoy this, I understand, but it is important to put something really new in there for the industry.”
Kojima, who’s known for doing exhaustive and sprawling research for his games, sounds like he’d like other devs to adopt a similar tack. He recalls a visit to a specific studio making an MGS-like military-stealth game: “People who are making military games, they probably don’t know how to dismantle a gun or shoot a gun, so that’s kind of sad.”
God bless the Ssense journalist who asked the vital follow-up question—prodding Kojima as to whether he knows how to dismantle a gun. “Yes, because I’ve been doing this training as well,” answered Kojima (with, I like to imagine, a distant and steely glint in his eye), “and I learned so many ways to kill people as well.”
Did he expand on that? You bet your bottom dollar he did not. He probably just means he’s read up on a lot of different gruesome ways to bite it in order to prep for his many games in which people kill one another. But I’m equally prepared to believe Kojima is a master of ninjutsu in his spare time.
Anyway, with that juicy information left dangling like a T-bone, Kojima mostly just stuck to the more prosaic ground of modern game dev. He reckons that the most interesting work out there comes from indie studios rather than the risk-averse goliath devs and publishers. He’s far from alone—this is a note other major industry figures have been hitting recently. It was just under two weeks ago that John Romero said indies are the future of game dev. Though Romero didn’t also suggest he could easily kill everyone else in the room.
His boredom at seeing the same things repeated endlessly in mind, you’ve gotta wonder how Kojima feels about Konami returning to the Metal Gear well with a remake of MGS 3. He’s keeping (mostly) schtum, probably wisely, but he did let one thing slip: when he was asked if he intended to play the remake, he laughed. “No, I won’t,” said Kojima.
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