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Before PlayStation 1, I was making games for the PC only in Japan, and for the first time I had a chance to release a game outside of Japan because the PS1 was sold worldwide. After that, my life changed. Since I was working on a PC-base, the Metal Gear theme or world was targeted to a higher age. So I still had questions. What if I created this game for a Nintendo system? I still think that it might not have been as successful as it was on PlayStation 1. That means that the PlayStation 1 hardware itself, the people that followed the hardware, that means that I felt that Sony and Metal Gear were a good match.
With the rumors of PlayStation 2 and that it will use the emotion engine, I was thinking about what to make use of for Metal Gear Solid 2. Since Metal Gear Solid 2 was a smash hit worldwide - much more of a smash hit than Metal Gear Solid 1 - for Metal Gear Solid 3 it was a very natural choice to stay with the PlayStation platform.
The top priority for me to make Metal Gear Solid is for the fans who love Metal Gear Solid. If the users support the PlayStation over the years, and we thought that this was the case, I created Metal Gear for those users. So that was the top priority.
It is safe to say that I don’t dislike other platforms. The reason why I always select the PlayStation format is because at the same time that I was unknown, the PlayStation was unknown. They were a good match, and they evolved to what Metal Gear and PlayStation are today, meaning that with Metal Gear Solid, I strongly believe that I will follow with the Sony PlayStation onward because many users support that hardware as well.
GI: Your devotion to the Sony hardware is very understandable given that history. But do you think that there could have been a chance that the series could have gone multiplatform if the Xbox or GameCube versions of the games had been bigger hits?
Kojima: It’s a difficult question to answer, because multi-format is not what I like to do in terms of game development. I believe that all hardware has good points and bad points. With the rivals of this hardware battle, that grows, meaning that the game industry grows. If game hardware is integrated to one, and games are integrated to one, then we die, same as nature. So what I thought was that I wanted to create a game for the PlayStation, specifically using the PlayStation and what the PlayStation could do. Same for the Xbox. I would like to create games for the Xbox, to take advantage of what the Xbox is the most capable of doing.
For instance, Metal Gear Solid 2 was specifically created for PlayStation 2, because the PlayStation 2 was capable of creating transparent polygons. Alpha - meaning combinations of transparent polygons was what gave them the idea to express rain and wind using the PS2. So it was suitable for users to play using the PlayStation format. When it was converted to Xbox, that’s a little different, because there is a change there of the expression. It’s not as complete, because it was designed specifically for the PlayStation 2.
I should not say anything bad about our competition, but look at Splinter Cell 2, the Xbox version looks really great, but the PS2 looks a little odd, with choppy graphics. I think that is not loyal to the loyal game fans. I don’t want to do that kind of thing.
So for Metal Gear Soild 4, we have already started the project for the PlayStation 3 platform. We would like to concentrate specifically on what we could do just for the PlayStation 3. For example, if I was to create Metal Gear Solid 5 or another title for the Xbox 360, I would create solely for the 360, taking advantage of the hardware, and would not convert to PlayStation 3, because that will not be a very good conversion. Another example is the Revolution. I will try to create a title specifically taking advantage of the Revolution hardware.
So it wasn’t the hardware’s fault for the conversion edition of the Xbox game, or the GameCube version of the Twin Snakes. It didn’t do as well as people thought because it was a conversion. It wasn’t created for that machine. If Metal Gear Solid was created specifically for GameCube or Xbox, the result would have been a lot different.
GI: Clearly you’re interested in other games and other hardware, but you’re back for Metal Gear Solid 4. You’ve said that you were done with the series before, so what made you come back for a final Metal Gear Solid game?
Kojima: It’s similar to Hayao Miyazaki. It’s a difficult question. For Metal Gear Solid 3, I started doing the story design, the plot, the gameplay systems. With finishing with Metal Gear Solid, I thought I would leave Metal Gear Solid 4 for the staff, who did 1, 2, and 3 together, and I would become the producer, so I could create time for other genres, and just manage or produce the title and not do direction, like I did for the past series.
For Metal Gear Solid 4 I thought of just working on the story, the world, or maybe the plot, and leaving other things to the younger staff. Back in March, during the European tour, I announced that I would not be working as intensively on Metal Gear Solid 4. I wasn’t trying to say I was just going to be a producer, just looking after money like other producers sometimes do. I was going to look to the content like a movie producer. But ever since I announced that, there was a lot of misunderstanding, and I got a lot of mail. I got many calls and fan letters saying that they will kill me if I don’t do Metal Gear. And of course the staff heard about this and got very nervous. We talk today as if it was a joke, but at the time, it was not a joke at all. It was serious. And the staff came to me and said “Mr. Kojima, you have to direct this, just like you’ve always been doing.” So I decided to do Metal Gear Solid 4. And since I am doing Metal Gear Solid 4, I really had to sit down and do it, meaning that the original plan for other games that I had will be pushed a little bit off into the future.
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! Teh d00m3d!
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