E3 2003 Hideo Kojima Interview
by Gamers.com, 15.05.2003

Hideo Kojima seems to have become accustomed to being the man of the hour at events like this -- it doesn't seem to affect him that much one way or the other. He's now showed jaw-dropping games at four successive E3 exhibitions, and yet he remains one of the most self-effacing people in the games industry. It sure would be easier for us if his secret were contagious.
Gamers.com was able to catch up with Mr. Kojima and talk to him about his suddenly expansive slate of future projects -- especially the newly-debuted Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes on the Gamecube and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater on the Playstation 2. As always, he had plenty of interesting things to say.

Gamers.com: We've seen a new environment in the Snake Eater trailer, and we'd like to know if the amount of research you've done for this new gameplay -- surviving in the jungle, having to hunt and eat animals -- is that as extensive as what you've done for earlier games?

Kojima: First of all, when we came up with the idea for this environment, the jungle, we asked ourselves "What kind of a jungle do we want?" Since we're Japanese, we wanted to go with a jungle that had a Japanese flavor. So we visited this island called Yakushima in Japan -- if you've seen the Miyazaki film Princess Mononoke, that's where that story is based on. It doesn't take place in Yakushima, but we got the inspiration from that island.

We also went to a nearby island called Amami Oshima. This place has mangroves, these trees with roots that grow into the ocean, it's the only place in Japan where they have those trees. We also visited the Canadian forests, and the mountains nearby Tokyo. We'll also be implementing things like mountains and caves in the game, so we'll be visiting places like that in the future. And we occasionally visit places like zoos and snake centers to do research on the little critters in the game.

The biggest thing we did, though, is that we went on a one-night trip with Mr. Mori, our military advisor, into the mountains. He gave us training, like into the night -- we wore camo gear, we did our stalking, we practiced walking techniques. At midnight, we had guards in front of our own cottages, with exercises like Team A attacks Team B around midnight and such. We'll be doing this more often. There were three teams -- my team survived, but the other ones got killed (laughs).

Gamers.com: Have you considered leaving Japan again to do more research like that, or does Japan have all the environments you need?

Kojima: We actually wanted to go to various places around the world, but the company said, no, don't do it. The places we chose were pretty dangerous -- places that were at war when we wanted to go to them.

Gamers.com: Is Mr. Shinkawa still the mechanical and character designer for this game, and is he contributing anything to the design of the environments, or is that based purely on life?

Kojima: Yes, he's still designing characters and mecha. He also directs lighting, but other background designers handle the jungle. Shinkawa did go to the mountains with us, but he's not necessarily the active athletic type, so he's usually sitting down all the time doing his sketches (laughs).

Gamers.com: About the three-dimensional nature of the environments, we've seen Snake climbing trees and diving over waterfalls. How big is the environment on the vertical axis, as well as just the horizontal?

Kojima: There is a lot of the up and down as well as the left and right. Also, in Metal Gear Solid, the top of the screen is always north -- the view and the camera doesn't follow you from behind all the time. So if you keep on going up north, heading that way, you think you won't get lost. But it's not that simple in this game. You have to climb up hills to see what's ahead of you, or go down waterfalls to keep away from something, or maybe you'll find something that blocks your way so you have to go around it, or down cliffs.

There are many games on the PC that sort of have a jungle -- they look like a jungle, but really, they have roads. That's not what we're aiming for.

Gamers.com: We're familiar with stealth as the key element in the Metal Gear games, but Metal Gear Solid 3 adds survival as a companion to that. How does wilderness survival gameplay work beyond simply having to hunt and eat, when he's confronted by the environment as well as his enemies?

Kojima: Probably two-thirds of the entire game takes place in the wilderness. Not only the jungle, but just general non-building areas. The thing is, the element of survival doesn't just involve filling your stomach. If it's cold, you have to fight the temperature, you have to fight the weather. There are enemies that aren't just enemy soldiers, too -- animals, snakes and the like attacking you. If you get sick, if you break a bone, you'll have to work around those problems as well.

Now that I mentioned a snake, you can eat a snake, but the snake can bite you, and if you're poisoned by a snake you have to treat yourself properly. And then you don't necessarily have to eat a snake -- you can grab it and throw it at an opponent.

The enemies in the previous games were always human. Now, this time it's the player versus the natural environment, which encompasses the enemy soldiers, the temperature, and other things. As for food, though, you don't always have to eat snakes -- you're always able to sneak into the enemy base and steal their food.

Gamers.com: Related to the subject of survival, the previous games have taken place on a pretty compressed time scale. The original Metal Gear Solid, you could assume, took maybe a day. If survival is now an issue and Snake has to eat on a regular basis and such, what kind of time scale does the new game have?

Kojima: As of now, we really don't know how long it's going to be in that sense, how many days. But with any spy or espionage film, you usually have a time limit -- 48 hours or something like that. The time flow in the game is not going to be like real time, you won't be spending many days. Within the story, there will be a set time that won't be that long.

Gamers.com: We've seen a flash in the trailer that the game will take place in the 1960s, and we know from Metal Gear Solid that Solid and Liquid Snake aren't born until the 1970s. There's a theory that the protagonist we see is actually Big Boss, or someone else like that -- can you say anything about that?

Kojima: We'll leave it up to your imagination (laughs).

Gamers.com: You can interpret the reference to the '60s literally, as "the game is set in the '60s," but is that also meant to be a comment on the themes the game's meant to discuss?

Kojima: First of all, I really can't give anything away about the theme of the story -- if I do that, I'll give away a lot of the story, and that's something I obviously can't do. But the theme of the gameplay is the jungle, and in addition to that, it's espionage.

By answering this one part, I'm giving something away, but with Metal Gear Solid, I wanted to create espionage action. Since the previous two games took place in the near future, it's a sort of skewed form of espionage action. Espionage action works best in the Cold War era, so that's where we're bringing the game. That's where the sneaking mission concept works the best, in that era. Instead of having the game set in the 21st century, having it back then, when the United States and Russia were enemies and always trying to get something out of each other, and when you didn't know who were your friends and who were your foes, this is really the best time when you want to do an espionage game.

Gamers.com: How do the enemy tactics and Snake's tactics differ in the new game now that the environment is so much more open? In Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2, everything is made up of simple clean corners and hallways that run perpendicular to each other -- now there's no more 90-degree angles, so how does that affect gameplay?

Kojima: What we saw up through Metal Gear Solid 2 was close-quarters battle. This time, what we'll see is field combat, and it will be a totally different experience. You can still experience close-quarters battle in certain areas of the game, but what we're throwing in is only possible because of all this training we've been getting from our advisors.

Camouflage will play a big role -- for you and the enemy as well. You'll also be using techniques like stalking, walking very slowly with no noise, and tracking as well, following the enemy's footprints while they're trying to follow yours. All these types of battle will be taking place in the game, it'll be a very different experience.

Also, when you see four guys walking together in the trailer, the soldiers? These guys have AI that's totally different from the AI in the first two games. When they spot you, they won't be calling for more help. Those four guys will be working together as a team, trying to get you.

Since you're infiltrating the enemy base from the jungle, though, eventually you will get to the enemy's base and experience something that's similar to the previous games, though.

Gamers.com: More than ever, we're seeing a trend of remakes in the industry, making old games for new technology -- given this trend, have you thought of remaking other titles, like Policenauts?

Kojima: The answer is no, I wouldn't be doing that. The reason I'm doing Twin Snakes is that Nintendo approached us, saying "Would you do a Metal Gear game for us?" Mr. Miyamoto is a man I respect, I can't really say no to him. So then Nintendo, and Silicon Knights, and my friend Mr. Kitamura got involved in this collaboration, and I knew that we could create something new based on an old game. That's why we're doing it.

Gamers.com: We heard how Mr. Miyamoto introduced you to Silicon Knights, but how did Mr. Kitamura become involved with Twin Snakes?

Kojima: We were friends, and we'd always said we'd love to work together in the future someday. I don't know if you've seen the film Versus, but he's probably the man in Japan who's closest to Hollywood.

I came up with the script, obviously, so I gave him the script and asked him if he could work on Twin Snakes. Then, I asked him to take care of the cinemas. So he and his team came up with the storyboard -- he tells the actors what to do on the spot during the motion capture, he does all the direction, he basically does everything during the motion capture.

When we received the storyboards from Mr. Kitamura, it was totally different from what our original polygon demos were. Then, when we do the motion capture, it changes there. And when we put that in the final game, it changes even more. So when you see the cinemas in Twin Snakes, it'll be totally different from what you saw in the original Metal Gear. The motion capture took almost two months, including the rehearsal, and we were doing it every day. It's as much as three films, almost.

The polygon demos you see in the trailer and the playable version are the very first demos. Mr. Kitamura tried to respect my work with those, so he tried to be as loyal to the original demos as possible. So they don't look that different. But that's not what we wanted to do, so from maybe midway on, he changed it drastically -- he really explodes.

Gamers.com: In what ways does Mr. Kitamura's style differ substantially from the original game?

Kojima: Well, he said in his video message "fasten your seat belt." (laughs) My staff and the motion capture actors who worked on Metal Gear Solid 2 came to us when they saw the storyboards Mr. Kitamura had created -- they asked "Are we really going to do this? Is this okay?" I said "We're going to do it, why not?" The battle between Solid and Liquid Snake at the end of the game is...(makes excited hand gestures).

There's a thing called...I don't know, an air ram, it's a pneumatic thing that shoots people into the air. We used that -- it's pretty dangerous.

Gamers.com: In the scene with the guy who's kick-starting the motorcycle, who's the actor playing that character?

Kojima: It's the guy who plays Johnny Sasaki in the Japanese Metal Gear Solid [editor's note: Johnny is the unfortunate Genome Soldier guarding Snake's cell, the one with the cold].

Gamers.com: Is that a scene from the final game, or is that composed just as an in-joke?

Kojima: For that scene and the "tell me the release date!" scene, we composed the voice acting and motion capture for E3 only.

Gamers.com: With Twin Snakes adding all the new gameplay features from Metal Gear Solid 2, how radically do the level designs and enemy designs have to change? How much will the gameplay experience differ from the original game?

Kojima: We're changing the stages to make sure than the enemy AI and the Metal Gear Solid 2 actions that we're implementing are used effectively in the game, but we're not going to change it too drastically. This game is based on the original Metal Gear Solid, after all. As far as the characters, though, like the Fox Hound guys, their motions and such will totally change. Mr. Kitamura is changing those aspects a lot.

Gamers.com: Now that you have...four games in development in about the space of a year -- ZOE2, Boktai, Twin Snakes, and Metal gear Solid 3 -- by comparison, you only had Snatcher and Policenauts between Metal Gear 2 and Metal Gear Solid. What's it like working on so many games at the same time?

Kojima: It is tough. Back then, I was just a game creator, so I focused on what I had to create and direct. Now, when we established our company in Tokyo, to create Metal Gear Solid, I was not only a game creator. I was also part of the management of the company. Obviously, I only have limited time, so I can't be director of every single game. I have to figure out how to divide my time properly -- should I be the director for this title, am I going to be the producer? I have to make sure the company's making money, make sure that it has a few production lines going at the same time. It's tough.

Ideally, I'd love to spend three years on one title only and do nothing else, like Policenauts, but that's not going to happen.

Gamers.com: With Mr. Kitamura getting involved with the game, now we have an even closer cross-pollination between the games and the movies -- do you think there's something in common between directing games and directing independent films like the ones he got his start with, like they're both innovating outside the mainstream?

Kojima: I guess, back in the Policenauts and Snatcher days, working on those games was more like an independent film, where the game creator does the design, maybe even programs, does everything himself. Now, Metal Gear and games like that are large-scale projects, more like Hollywood. Ideally I'd love to do everything myself, but with a game like Metal Gear that's impossible, I have to leave it up to the guys on the production lines.

And Mr. Kitamura, even in his indie days, he already had a production line with different units and such. He was still doing it the Hollywood way. Although he's directing the polygon demos, he'd probably like to direct the whole thing.

I've been told by Mr. Kitamura that he's been a fan of my work since the Snatcher days -- I guess that's a sign I'm getting old.

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