Kojima: "There's Still Life in the Japanese Game Industry"

The man behind Metal Gear spills the beans on Rising, Platinum Games, and even MGS5.

There’s been a lot of buzz surrounding the newly-renamed Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and Hideo Kojima. Since showing off the new game concept at the Spike TV VGAs, Kojima has been all over talking about the reason for the changes, and why he went with Platinum Games for the game design. He’s been pleased with the reactions on Twitter, and has said that he feels that the VGAs will be the place to announce games in the future, as opposed to E3. Mr. Kojima recently talked at length about the new Rising project, and even let slip a little tidbit about what Metal Gear Solid 5 could be.

In a special video production for Konami, Kojima talks about the history of the troubled Metal Gear Solid Rising project. After the team wrapped up on Metal Gear Solid 4, Kojima realized that they would need to get the 5^th game underway soon. Planning to have less of a hand in the next entry to the stealth franchise, he instead came up with a core concept for the story. This idea would focus on The Boss and her Fox team during World War II which, as fans may remember, is how she became a legend on the battlefield. After completing this concept, Kojima passed it on to a team within Kojima Productions and moved on to work on Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.

However, the team was uncomfortable working on the next MGS game without its creator. Instead, discussions lead to an action game starring Raiden, set between MGS 2 and 4. This took some of the pressure off of the team, and they went to work on this more action-focused game. There were problems within the team, and they decided that a Metal Gear game needed to have stealth as well as action. This led to a lot of redesigns, and when Kojima would take a look at what the Rising team was doing, he wasn’t pleased. This became public knowledge at the time, but what was unknown until this past week is that he had actually pulled the plug on Rising last year.

So much work had been done with the story and the core concept of slicing through enemies and objects that Kojima didn’t want to scrap everything. He wanted to find an outside team to take over the design, and first looked to Western developers. In the end, however, Kojima decided that Rising was a “ninja action game”, and needed to have a Japanese feel to it. “We want to prove that there’s still life in the Japanese game industry,” he says in the video. “We are making things for a global audience, while still preserving unique Japanese elements. These days, it’s hard to find others who share this type of vision.”

Platinum Games is a company that seems to share that vision, and it was a studio that Kojima personally selected to finish Rising. But as the new team went to work, their ideas impressed the Metal Gear creator, and the new game, Revengeance, has been remade almost from the ground up. It no longer runs on Kojima Productions’ FOX engine, but has been moved over to the Platinum engine. Many of the new character designs come straight from Platinum, though “Kojipro” is handling the story and cutscenes. According to Kojima, this is a true collaboration. We’ll give you more information about this collaboration as we receive it. As they say in Japan, “please look forward to it.”