aquaria

1998 Interview with Hideo Kojima (Arcade)

This interview was published circa December 1998 in Arcade Magazine (Issue 1, Pages 39,42-43). It was conducted that October at a Tokyo restaurant, just after Tokyo Games Show Autumn 1998.

Among the interviewers was Neil West, Hiro Izumi, and Jason Brookes.


Hideo Kojima


Hideo Kojima is producer of Konami's red-hot Metal Gear Solid, due for release in the UK this February. The game is already available in Japan, where it has been dubbed "the best PlayStation game of all time" by several magazines. It's selling by the bucketload too, and Kojima-san is enjoying something approaching rock star status in his native Tokyo.

Arcade caught up with him at the Tokyo Games Show to talk about his ground-breaking sneak-'em-up, and its hero, Solid Snake...

ARCADE:
You've become pretty famous in Tokyo. Are you enjoying it?

KOJIMA:
Now that Metal Gear's been out for a month, I can relax — I can walk around and see stuff. When my own games first go on sale I worry about what other people think of them. I get very nervous. But now I can walk around making other people nervous!

ARCADE:
Have you been stalked by any crazy Japanese fans?

KOJIMA:
There was this one guy who used to work in the Japanese Self Defence Army. He sent me a whole bunch of pictures of himself without a shirt posing with a model gun in his hand. These were crazy photos. In his letter he wrote "Use me as Snake!" and kept on explaining how physically fit he was. Luckily, not all gamers are like this.

ARCADE:
How involved are you in the UK version of Metal Gear Solid?

KOJIMA:
Mainly it's just a case of translating the language and moving from NTSC to PAL. We haven't added any major features, it's just little things. Japanese and Western gamers have slightly different tastes in terms of difficulty level, for example.

ARCADE:
Hang on. Are you calling Western gamers poofs?

KOJIMA:
No — I meant the other way round. We actually have to make it easier for the Japanese gamers. They're accustomed to playing easy games. They're used to being able to finish everything they play.

You see, I think you get used to games like you get used to cars: if you're used to a heavy-steering car, then you might not feel comfortable driving a car with light steering. So US and European gamers would be dissatisfied with the difficulty level of the Japanese version.

ARCADE:
Plenty of English gamers are so keen to play Metal Gear Solid, they've bought Japanese versions on import. Assuming they can't speak Japanese, how much are they missing out on?

KOJIMA:
They won't understand the storyline and the in-game dialogue. But the real fun of the game is sneaking around, hiding and creeping up on enemies, and all this is the same, regardless of language. And the message of the game — anti-war, anti-nuclear weapons — is quite simple and pretty obvious.

ARCADE:
Anti-war? But Snake is so incredibly violent. If I was to meet him in a bar, do you think he'd be friendly?

KOJIMA:
It's hard to say. We tried not to give him too much character because we want players to be able to take on his role. Snake isn't like a movie star. He's not someone you watch, he's someone you can step into the shoes of. Playing Snake gives gamers the chance to be a hero.

ARCADE:
OK, so he's mysterious. But let's try to add a little colour. What would he choose to sing at a karaoke party?

KOJIMA:
If he had to, I think he'd probably pick something like "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" by Burt Bacharach. With the BJ Thomas vocal — from the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He'd probably sing in a whispering, mumbling kind of way.

Snake likes songs with positive lyrics more than love songs. There may be times on the battlefield when he sings while reloading his gun.

ARCADE:
Does he get invited to many parties?

KOJIMA:
Snake is not the sociable type, but he does want to go to parties. He gets invited often and goes to the venue. But he stands outside and stares through the window at the people inside, envying all the fun they're having.

ARCADE:
Now we're getting somewhere. He smokes, too. Was it hard getting cigarettes in the game? Some publishers get funny about it.

KOJIMA:
People of our generation, we grew up with these hard-boiled characters in hardcore espionage stories — and they all smoked cigarettes and wore shades. So Snake had to do the same in the game. Konami didn't have a problem with it because we let the player know that cigarettes are bad for them. Snake's life bar goes down when he's smoking.

ARCADE:
It seems that smoking a pack of Snake's cigs equates to taking a bullet in the head! Those are pretty serious fags he's got...

KOJIMA:
It's not that bad. And he can't die from smoking. If you were down to your last little bit of health, and lit a cigarette, it wouldn't kill you. We were planning to include more of the cigarettes in the gameplay. At one point you would be stuck in a cell with no way out. The trick would be to befriend the guard by giving him a cigarette, but this idea didn't make it to the final game.

ARCADE:
What games first made you catch the videogame bug?

KOJIMA:
Super Mario Bros, The Portopia Serial Murder Case[1] (which is a text adventure game), and the shoot-'em-up Xevious.

ARCADE:
And have those early experiences shaped the way you approach your own games?

KOJIMA:
I am influenced by many things but, yes, these early games did make a big impact on me. Super Mario Bros taught me what an action game should aspire to be. The Portopia Serial Murder Case taught me that it's possible to mix great gameplay with a strong story line. From Xevious I learned that you can create an entire universe in which a game can take place. I've tried to do all that for Solid Snake.

It's pretty damn frustrating being a UK gamer, and thus having to wait a good six months after Metal Gear Solid's release in Japan for the game to make its official UK debut ... But it could be worse. Spare a thought for the real Snake fan — the diehard who's been waiting almost ten years for a third installment in the Metal Gear series ...

The original Metal Gear, also produced by Mr Kojima, debuted in 1987 on the ... MSX2 ... Its sequel, Solid Snake, was released ... to rapturous acclaim. But then it all went quiet ... It seemed Snake had taken early retirement.

But no — Kojima was just waiting for graphics technology to catch up with his ideas for what Metal Gear Solid should be. "I have lots of ideas", he says, "and even right now there are many things I want to do that just aren't possible with the machines that are available currently".

Footnotes

  1. The original text refers to this game as Murder in the Portal.⬆️