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Kojima, Shinkawa, Matsuhana...
by GameSpy, 08.01.2004

Today we have Mr. Hideo Kojima, vice president of KCEJ and director of the Metal Gear series. And we have Yoji Shinkawa, who's an art director, character and mechanical designer for the Metal Gear Solid series. He's also worked on the Zone of the Enders series. And Yoshikazu Matsuhana, who's the assistant director of the Metal Gear Solid series. He's pretty much taking the lead for the Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes project together with Silicon Knights of Canada.

Kojima: Thank you very much for coming today. Our company, Konami Computer Entertainment Japan, used to consist of two offices. One was in an area of Tokyo called Ebisu -- that's where we were, and where we made the Metal Gear series, ZOE series, and Boktai. There was another office in an area called Shinjuku, and they worked on licensed titles such as Yu-Gi-Oh!. We've come together on this one floor of the new office on July 7, 2003. It's such a huge floor it's really hard to go around by walking, so that's why I got the Segway.

This is the first time that we've actually invited the press into our office since we came here on July 7. We'll give you a tour after this Q&A session.

We're going to begin with Twin Snakes questions, and then MGS3 questions and others after that.

Question: Maybe we can just start with where in development Twin Snakes is right now -- what's being worked on and concentrated on at this point?

Kojima: By the end of September we're basically throwing in all the specs of the gameplay, and from then on -- from October on -- we'll be tweaking. Adjusting the difficulty level, making sure everything works, playing the game through to the end.

Question: I want to know what the process was like to get film director Ryuhei Kitamura involved. Did you sit him down and show him all of the cutscenes from the original MGS so that he could decide how to enhance them?

Kojima: Mr. Kitamura had actually played MGS in the past, but we pretty much asked him to play it over and over again. And then he came up with a huge stack of storyboards -- 700 pages showing how he wanted to change MGS. And then our motion people and our programmers got together and went through those 700 pages and it was a boiling down process. There were things that we couldn't do technically, and some of his suggestions were just not possible. So we boiled that down and took that to the motion-capturing sessions.

Question: Can you give an example of what was not possible?

Kojima: We've actually done pretty much all he asked of us. It's pretty hard to come up with something we didn't do. We needed to finalize everything before going into the motion capture studio, but we didn't want to do that because myself and Mr. Kitamura come up with great ideas on the spot while we do the motion capture. He's a great live action director, and he just comes up with all of these things while we're doing it. The thing is, he comes up with these great ideas which require different backgrounds and stuff, like a set of stairs or whatever, so we have to assemble all of that on the spot, and that's really tough to do.

For example, there was a time when we were going to shoot a scene where enemies were thrown into the air by an explosion, and Mr. Kitamura said, "I want to do it like the scene from the movie Commando." We basically brought in this thing called an "air ram" which is almost never used in motion capture, that sends people off into the air like a catapult, and used that for the whole day.

Question: What would you say is your favorite of the new scenes created for Twin Snakes?

Kojima: It's not one scene, but this is something I like about it. Ocelot, as you know, gets his right hand chopped off. So in the game he starts spinning his gun with his left hand ... but he drops it. And then he picks it up, and he drops it again. Every time he appears he does the spinning thing, and you can tell that he gets better at doing it with his left hand, and eventually he doesn't drop it anymore.

Question: Did they pick Kitamura-san based on his work with the film Versus?

Kojima: I went to a preview screening of Versus and I met him there for the first time. And then I got to see a film by him called Alive when it came to theaters, and I was like, "Oh, my God, this is so great. If I don't start working with him now he'll never work with me ... he'll be such a great director." So I went to him.

Question: So you said you liked Mr. Kitamura's work a lot. But I was wondering if there are any other film directors that have influenced you, and as a result influenced the way your games get designed.

Kojima: It's really hard to come up with names, because I've been influenced by all of the film directors ... that would be a few hundred film directors and a few thousand films I've seen, which have all influenced me.

Question: Now that you're in the process of doing the scenes, how many new cuts does Twin Snakes have? How many more cuts were you able to put in?

Kojima: The cutscenes added up to maybe a little over two hours in the original MGS, and in the new version it's over three hours, so it's like an extra hour. The number of cuts, we can't really compare. The original MGS was limited by the lower power of the original PlayStation, so it was a given that the characters wouldn't move that much. A lot of the game cinemas were done with hand-drawn animation, not motion capture. We basically moved around cameras given the fact that the characters didn't move much, so it's hard to compare.

Question: Could you do a rough comparison between the amount of motion capture and hand animation in Twin Snakes?

Matsuhana: 80% of the animation in the gameplay is done by hand, because while motion captured animation shows natural movements, it doesn't work in that context. The hand-drawn motion for the gameplay is all done in-house at KCEJ, new, for this game. All of the cinemas are motion captured.

Question: What sort of involvement does Shinkawa-san have with Twin Snakes? Does Silicon Knights have any involvement in the process of redoing the machines that appear in the game?

Shinkawa: I've pretty much added my touches to things that I couldn't do in the original MGS, but that I could now do. I got a lot of requests from the designers and artists -- "please draw this." For example, with the Metal Gear Rex, in the first game the missiles were just triangular tubes due to the polygon count. I had to do a new sketch of Rex with real missiles. Since Rex is a very important robot, we did that model in-house instead of having the team do it in Canada.

Question: How much of the game is being developed by Silicon Knights in Canada, and how much here in Japan? From what you've said, it seems like a lot of the game is being handled by KCEJ directly.

Matsuhana: Probably 60% of the game is done in Canada, 40% here.

Question: Is any area of the development being concentrated on more in one place or the other?

Kojima: The cinemas are pretty much done here in Japan, and the motion and sound for them too. The gameplay and its sound are done in Canada. All of the instructions and orders do come from us, and we tell Silicon Knights what to do in each area, even for the gameplay.

Question: Do you find that it's a good way to develop a game -- an international collaboration? How does it compare to the regular way of developing?

Kojima: I think it will be a trend. I think it's a good thing we're doing. For example, one of our team members was in Canada for ten months. We have video conferences almost every day, and Nintendo, which is in Kyoto, also takes place in that process. Since we work so closely with these people, we don't feel this geographic distance between us. It's been working well, and I think it will be a trend. We'd like to make this our first step to continue this collaborative process in the future.

Question: What sort of involvement has Nintendo had on the project?

Matsuhana: I guess that Mr. Miyamoto is the overall producer.

Question: When you say that it's the first step, and you'd like to continue doing this in the future, would you like to work with Silicon Knights again or simply that you would like to continue collaborating with other studios in other parts of the world?

Kojima: We don't know who we'd be working with together in the future, but since this is our first time doing it, it was sort of an experiment. Because it was an experiment, we wanted to play it safe -- that's why it was Metal Gear Solid, something that already existed, and doing a rebirth of it. But in the future we'd like to come up with a totally new project that doesn't exist now. That way you'll see a lot of us in the project and them -- whoever they are -- in the game. You'll see a lot of both cultures in the final product.

You can move onto questions about our other games now, if you want.

Question: I have to ask this burning MGS 3 question -- whose idea was the crocodile hat?

Kojima: It was my idea.

Question: Is there anything you've learned from the development of Twin Snakes that has been incorporated into the ongoing development of Snake Eater?

Kojima: Not really, because we're working on both projects at the same time, so it's hard for the projects to influence each other. MGS3 is done totally in-house, and we're doing it our way. Now that we've worked with Mr. Kitamura and we've seen how he's done things during the motion-capture sessions, we're thinking hard about what we want to do and have to do with our own motion-capture sessions for MGS3 to bring it up to par.

Question: Are any of the ZOE team members working on MGS3, or are they separate teams? Or is MGS3 so all-encompassing you have to bring in those programmers and artists?

Kojima: It's a secret.

Question: MGS 2 was a couple of years ago now, and you're now working hard on MGS 3. But has working on Twin Snakes and being so close to the original MGS again influenced Snake Eater? I know that MGS3 will exceed MGS2, but has the closeness of original game affected you?

Kojima: It's actually really influencing us, going back to MGS and then working on MGS 3. I actually went back and played the original MGS, and I shouldn't be saying this because it's my own game, but I really enjoyed playing it. I want to introduce that taste of enjoyment of playing MGS into MGS3, so that's one of my goals.

Question: This question is for Mr. Shinkawa. Metal Gear has historically been set a little ahead of the present, and the mechanical designs are slightly futuristic. That's different for Snake Eater -- how is it designing something that's a bit behind the present?

Shinkawa: There's a person on the team who works with me and helps me come up with these older designs for not just the mechanics, but also the characters. This person is sort of hardcore in that direction, he goes in and tries to catch something from the past, and helps me come up with the sixties flavor.

In all honesty, for me, it's easier to come up with a futuristic design, especially when my designs wouldn't have to be limited at all. If we go back in time I can't come up with something that's totally wild looking. I have to use a past, historical look.

Question: Following up on that question, going through the pamphlet you've given us, the timing seems to center in the 1960s. Is this the actual time period the game takes place in, or just an aesthetic influence? I can't imagine people in the future just wanting their weapons to look retro. It seems like this game is taking place in the past.

Following that, is Kojima-san prepared to give any clues about the identity of the lead character? Because the Snake that we know would probably be too young.

Kojima: As for who this Snake guy is, I can't say anything, but what you have in mind is pretty much correct. And yes, the game does take place in the sixties.

Question: We're not going to fall for some big trick half an hour into the game?

Kojima: There might be something nice in there.

Question: One thing I've been wondering about -- it's kind of a fashion for long running series, for example when Zelda: The Wind Waker was released, as part of the campaign it came with a disc with Ocarina of Time. I was wondering if you were considering doing anything like that with some of the older 8-bit Metal Gear titles. It might be an opportunity for the MSX Metal Gear 2, which never has come out in the U.S., to do so.

Kojima: I personally don't think that the old games look that good. I sort of want to bury those old games in the past, because it's not retro enough. If it were even older, it would probably be neat to stick it into my game. The thing is that it does have a few colors, but it doesn't have enough colors. It doesn't look good at all.

Question: I have a question about the setting. In the grand scheme of things, was it always planned to go back and visit the '60s-- was that something you'd always wanted to do with the Metal Gear Solid series? I also wonder the same thing about the eating. Was it something you'd wanted to tackle, or was it something you decided on when it was time to start figuring out what MGS 3 would be?

Kojima: I always had the idea of going back in time in mind. I always wanted to do that sometime. As for the whole survival thing, that was something I came up with when we first started designing MGS 3.

Question: How is making outdoor levels?

Kojima: It's very tough to do.

Question: Has it influenced gameplay in ways you had not expected?

Kojima: Since you're in the jungle there are no flat surfaces, so the whole collision thing, walking above these rocks and mounds is really tough. We could not use the collision engine from the previous game. Another problem with that is the motion capture, setting it up so people could walk over these mounds. That's a big problem we have to overcome in the next few months.

Question: Did you have to do some survival training in the jungles with Mori-san?

Kojima: The three of us and nine other guys -- twelve total -- were taken into the mountains by Mr. Mori and we were given rations. We were told to not eat anything besides the rations, and we actually had to place a guard at night. We had two-hour shifts, and we all had to do it.

Yoji Shinkawa and I were on the same, and Mr. Matsuhana was on a different team. His team was attacked by Mr. Mori's team and they were all killed. Mr. Mori's team is killer -- they're so strong.

Question: So Mr. Mori has consulted since the original MGS for PlayStation, or before that?

Kojima: Yes, since MGS.

Question: So you've been training with Mr. Mori for MGS, MGS 2, and now MGS 3. Is Mr. Kojima's team the most lethal team of developers in the industry?

Kojima: Yeah. We have gone through a lot of training, including SWAT training. Mr. Mori has taken to a lot of different kinds of training and given us lectures. He actually thinks, like you said, that we are the best in the industry. He actually tests us to see what we've retained and the problem is that we've forgotten everything.

Question: So you could really eliminate the competition?

Kojima: I don't know. There are also trends and fads in the combat world. They used to fight this way five years ago, but now we do something else, and that's old stuff. It's fun to see the changes in the world.

Question: So has Mori-san tried to implement combat tactics from the '60s, or are we going to see more recent stuff because it's more fun?

Kojima: Actually, what you see in the game -- close quarters combat -- is cutting-edge fighting methods. As you say, we're throwing in the newest stuff because it's going to look better and it's going to be more fun. You saw Snake and the enemy soldier in our Snake Eater trailer? We actually motion-captured Mori for the first time, because a normal actor would not be capable of these advanced tactics.

Question: So Mori-san played the role of Snake?

Kojima: Yes, and the actor who was thrown was the actor who played the role of Raiden in the last game. The thing about Mr. Mori is, that when he does his throws he actually does them -- he's not just pretending. The guy being thrown gets damaged.

Question: What is Mori-san's actual background?

Kojima: Instruction. We really can't reveal what he's done in the past, because it's sensitive. These sorts of people have been in special forces.

Question: You didn't find him in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine, did you?

Kojima: He's actually written his own books about this sort of thing, and he writes novels too. I'd read a few of his books and I contacted him. It turned out that he'd played my games, just like Ryuhei Kitamura.

Question: Would you ever consider revisiting the hard sci-fi universe of Policenauts and Snatcher?

Kojima: I'd love to do something sci-fi. If I could have someone else work on the next Metal Gear, then I could work on something that would be sci-fi.

Question: MGS and MGS 2 were based on contemporary political and cultural issues. MGS was about the issue of genetics, and MGS 2 was about the future of information in the digital era. Does MGS 3 draw its cultural and political inspiration from the events of the '60s, as mentioned in the timeline you've handed out?

Kojima: Yes, it will involve the political and historical background of the '60s. By learning the past, it reflects the future in a way. Genetics, information, and then time ... these three things will work together and complete the saga and conclude the grand theme. Now that it will be concluded, I hope someone else will work on MGS 4.

By playing this game you will learn about what went on between the two superpowers -- the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Now there is no Soviet Union, there are no two superpowers. The world is so different. You will be able to see what the world has gone through and how it is now. This is the kind of thing I would like people to take from the game, and that's the message I want to portray.

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