The following interview(s) with Hideo Kojima is comprised of excerpts collected by "External Gazer", for the video essay Renga: A Document of Hideo Kojima.
I joined Konami in 1986, and my first game I worked on was Penguin Adventure. It was not me who was really the director on this game, it was rather the person who at the time was my mentor.
I joined Konami as a game designer, and I was simply asked to join his team. Originally, for Penguin Adventure, I had about 100 to 200 ideas a day. It was pretty easy to do, and obviously they liked my ideas. So since my work had been appreciated on Penguin Adventure, I was called to work with another team. The project that was in progress at the time was a wrestling game called Masked Fighters which unfortunately was canceled during development. But since the characters were pretty well-done and animated, I wondered if it was possible to re-use these characters and do something else with them. So for a month, I imagined another game, and then in development (as I was a new employee in this company) I was asked to go away for a three-month internship to develop. When I came back, the game had changed a little bit, and the character had become a woman, it had become a platformer - an action game, and I had prepared a script and ideas on about 200 to 300 pages. We worked on it for three months, but it was so ambitious that the scripted platformer game was canceled.
First of all, from the canceled game, Lost Warld, it put me in a somewhat awkward postition in the company. One of my bosses called me and he said: "Listen, since you still have some good ideas, we would like to give you a project. It's a fighting game, but not all of the experienced people who have embarked on this project have been able to do anything right with it. We would like you to try to do something". I was therefore entrusted with this game, which had war as its theme. I must admit that at the time, war games were the most important games, like Space Invaders for example, and I didn't want to play violent games. Finally, I told myself that I was going to be inspired by a film called The Great Escape, and rather than making a game where you had to attack people, I wondered if there was not a way to make a war game about running away.