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Hideo Kojima talks GameSpy
by GameSpy, 11.04.2004

Hideo Kojima freely shares his opinions. He sees the world through his own lens, and it's tempting to disagree with things he thinks are significant. But you cannot argue his success.

Kojima thinks the next big frontier in gaming could be smell. He wants to make a game that can be sold cheaply and can only be played once. He considers the ability to play movies and games to be the greatest accomplishment of the PlayStation 2. Needless to point out, these are not common views.

But they are valid. They would be valid simply on the grounds that Kojima believes them and he is the creator of the Metal Gear Solid series, one of the most successful and influential series in gaming today. And there is more to it than that. When you speak with Kojima, you begin to see the logic behind his conclusions. There is a reason why Kojima is ranked in the highest echelons of games designers -- he's brilliant and original.

The following are excerpts from an interview that GameSpy conducted with Hideo Kojima and Scott Dolph, Konami international affairs manager, in Konami's new Roppongi Hills offices:

GameSpy: Walk me through the process of creating a blockbuster like Metal Gear Solid 3.

Kojima: The first step is establishing the game plan. For example, if I were to take MGS3, after MGS2 I asked myself, 'What kind of MGS3 do I want to create?' That involved thinking about the entire concept of the game, the kinds of gimmicks I want to throw into the game, and even the overall coloring of the game.

If I had wanted to release MGS3 within a year of releasing MGS2, the easiest way of doing that would be to pick up where MGS2 ended, using the same engine, the same game system, even the same characters. I guess Electronic Arts and many other companies do this; but if I did that, it would be no fun at all.

I decided that MGS3 should be about survival, and I started thinking about how survival would work in the game. The game takes place in the '60s, and if the game was going to be about survival, I decided it had better take place in the jungle.

This process of deciding these things is the most important part of the game development cycle. I do all of this myself.

GameSpy: Why set the game in the '60s?

Kojima: Basically, MGS's roots are the 007 series. It's more about espionage and spies. The time frame when espionage was most lively was during the cold war era. That was the '60s.

[Personal Note: I could not agree more. In fact, I think the Bond movies should return to the '60s as well.]

When all of the guys on my team were on vacation -- after they finished MGS2 -- that was when I started thinking about these concepts, so that when they came back they would have something to work on. I presented them my concepts and we worked on them. The first thing we did was we started experimenting to see if we could actually do these things.

As you know, the previous MGS games took place in close quarters. They were always in rooms or in buildings. With a survival theme, you need to go out into the wilderness. The first experiment we needed to do was to find out if we could take MGS outdoors and have a real-time natural environment.

What we did to create the experimental environment was that we went to islands like Yakushima, Amami Oshima, and even places in Canada. These are places with a lot of vegetation, like Japanese jungles. Well, obviously not Canada. Based on our research, we created this fictional jungle forest to see if it worked.

Once we created the setting and saw that it worked, what we did next was to see if the other mechanics worked in this environment. For example, how did enemy guards and sentries react? That was when we got our military advisor, Mr. Mori. [Military advisor and former SWAT instructor Motosada Mori] We went into the Japanese mountains with him to have him lecture to us how to survive in the wilderness.

And Mr. Mori taught how camouflage works in the wilderness, and he showed us CQC [close-quarters combat] techniques. He showed us how the people really would fight against each other. He also taught us the technique of stalking, which is very slow. You don't make any sounds. While we learned these things, I also worked on the characters and the plot and the actual story so that they would work with the gameplay. What we showed at E3 2003 was basically the whole thing working in the jungle.

We had to change the graphics engine … the whole thing. We could not use the previous one. We could not have the jungle with all of its vegetation and then add the guards working together against the main character. It was just too slow.

And once we found out that we could actually do it using the new graphics engine, I started working seriously on the script, writing lines for the characters.

I worked on this thing called a 'script-ment.' It's basically the game from beginning to end, with notes about what happens throughout the game, what happens to the character, and whether there are sounds that he makes or sounds in the environment. … I come up with the whole thing. Based on the script-ment, we have the artists, the sound guys, and the programmers get together and discuss what needs to be done. They say, 'This we can do. This we cannot do.' When they discuss all of this, the script-ment becomes the skeleton of what we can actually do.

Then we can start writing lines of dialog and do the voice recording. That really shapes the game. What we are doing at this point is more like a process. It's not in that conceptual stage anymore. This is the point where we are just adding building blocks. We're just adding flesh to the skeleton.

A few months after day one of the conceptual stage, I came up with a game plan. But when I look at the game now, it really has not gone away from that basic game plan. My job is to create a game that is faithful to that early plan.

GameSpy: Some game developers create the setting first, others create the action first.

Kojima: I do bits of both in the sense that you obviously need a blueprint based on your basic developmental ideas. But while we create the building blocks, we start to think, 'Maybe we can do this here. Maybe we can do something else.'

Accidents or coincidences never make the game fun. The thing is whether or not the original ideas I created in my original game concept happen. … That is what makes a game fun. Giving a plan to somebody and telling him to make it, the game never becomes fun by coincidence. Well, I should not say never. I am sure there have been games that turned out to be fun by accident, but that is not my experience.

Whether or not a game sells, that is a different story. That can be caused by coincidence. For example, let's say that I target a specific age group. Maybe a completely different age group just loves the game. Things like that happen.

One thing that is very important and scary is that when you develop your game you need to make cuts because of budget, schedule, or technological limitations. The thing is, the branches you decide to cut off can really make a difference. You might have cut off a branch that you should have left because it was the essence or the guts of the fun of the game.

So if you cut off the wrong branch, you're left with a game without that fun. Cutting off branches sort of determines a game's destiny because you do need to make cuts during the process.

GameSpy: Scott, how long does it take to convert a massive game like a Metal Gear for a foreign market?

Dolph: I can't give you a timeframe like how many months because we always prepare the other versions at the same time that we are preparing the Japanese game. With the last MGS game, we released the U.S. version before we released the Japanese game. That's what we will probably do with the third game, too.

What we do is sort of finish the Japanese version, then switch the voice and the text in the meantime. We sort of keep the Japanese version on hold for one month.

GameSpy: Why would you release the U.S. version first?

Dolph: You know, it sells better in the United States. There are more people who buy the game and are waiting for the game. Also, the hype from the U.S. travels and that helps sales in Japan. If the game is big in the U.S., it will do better in Japan. And I do not think that the hype works for you the other way around.

Mr. Kojima says that you should not be thinking about each market independently. You should not be thinking that you want to make a game that appeals to the Americans. That's not a good thing, because if you are Japanese, you're not really going to know what the Americans want. You cannot generalize what the Americans want.

What you need to do is create what you want to create the right way, and not try to secure it against a certain audience.

GameSpy: What do you think of PSP?

Kojima: I have not seen it, but I personally want one. My nine-year-old son loves Game Boy Advance; but with PSP he will be able to listen to music. As a parent, I like that.

I play Super Mario Bros. for Game Boy Advance on Famicom Mini, and I know that it is enjoyable and fun. But the PSP will enable kids to play games, listen to music, maybe even watch a film. I look forward to that.

GameSpy: Is it too expensive?

Kojima: I don't know the price.

GameSpy: They are estimating PSP will retail for between 0 and 0.

Kojima: I personally want one. I don't think kids will buy PSP. It will allow you to do many things, but kids do not necessarily need all of those features.

I view films on my PlayStation 2. As a person in this industry, I recognize that films and music are rivals of video games. But as a consumer, I think it is great that one machine allows you to do all of these things.

Western people enjoy films and video games. The differentiation is that video games are interactive. I guess that is why people demand a high level of interactivity in games. That is not the case with Japanese consumers.

But when one machine allows you to play games and watch movies. … Visually, you cannot beat films. So you need to raise the level of interactivity in games. So when you can see films and games on one machine, I think consumers start demanding more from their video games.

Sony says that they want this PSP to be the next Walkman. The Walkman, when it came out, had different models. In my imagination, the PSP will come out with different models. Maybe there will be a very small, basic one, and a much bigger and sophisticated one with a lot of control buttons.

GameSpy: What do you think about DS?

Kojima: I think it is totally new, and I look forward to it. As a game creator, I look forward to working on it. And if it played music and allowed you to watch movies, that would be great.

GameSpy: Have you seen PS3 yet?

Kojima: I have not. I would love to develop for the PS3, but I have not seen it. I love to see things that other people have not seen.

GameSpy: Of the systems out there, which do you like best?

Kojima: I don't have a favorite. The thing is, I have been working on the PlayStation 2. I am very used to the system, the controls, the tools, and the development environment. Maybe I am too used to it.

The one thing I can say for sure is that the Xbox controller is too big.

GameSpy: Early on you said that PlayStation 2 was hard to work with.

Kojima: People on my team are masochistic. They enjoy the difficulty of working with PlayStation 2 and we assume that PlayStation 3 will be even more difficult. We know nothing about the system; but it's from Sony, so we assume so.

GameSpy: What will distinguish the next generation of games?

Kojima: I don't think there will be any big changes, unless, as I have often talked about, they come up with an odor sensor. They may come up with different I/Os [input/output] like the Eye-Toy, then we would see differences. But as long as they use a TV monitor and the same basic controllers that we use in your hand now, nothing is going to change.

Network capability is definitely a big element, but I don't think we will see anything as big as the transition from 2D to 3D. I think now that visuals have become so sophisticated, we have a great opportunity to spend our time making the games better internally in story, expression, things like that. The visuals and sound cannot become that much better than they are now.

For example, the life gage. … When that counts down to zero, your game ends and you have a choice whether to continue or exit the game. Maybe it's time we should rethink that thing and come up with something different.

There really was no giant leap from PlayStation 1 to PlayStation 2 except for better graphics and better sound. People talk about 'the Emotion engine,' but there wasn't that much to the Emotion engine.

Like I said before, in my mind, the biggest accomplishment of the PlayStation 2 is that it plays both video games and movies. I don't think the Japanese consumers understand how important that is, but I think Westerners might. Now that PlayStation 2 plays both games and films, it has told us that they are totally different things; and because they are different, developers need to pursue different paths. The path for video games must be highly interactive so that it is totally different than films.

Once the PlayStation 3 comes out, I think people will stop referring to games as being like films. I think it will be the other way around with movies that are like video games.

Games will need to change in the sense, and this is true not only in Japan but also in the West, when you think of games there is always this macho guy who carries around a weapon that he uses to blast everyone in sight. I think we will need to move beyond that. Hopefully, we will see more games that deal with the inside [issues] or deal with philosophy.

More than any other game designer, Kojima has found ways to merge film and gaming -- an interesting juxtaposition considering his views on the separation of those media. There are only a handful of authentic geniuses in the top echelons of game creation, and Hideo Kojima must be considered among them. This was the man who popularized stealth games. He has found ways to imbue suspense, humor, and philosophy into video games.

He's also returned his Bond-based hero to the '60s, a move United Artists and the makers of Bond have long overlooked. As the game industry matures, expect other designers to explore Kojima's ideas about philosophy and internal conflict.

As to odor-intensive games … only time will tell.

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