Apparently Hideo Kojima has been training in the ways of an assassin
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Hideo Kojima’s a notoriously offbeat guy, but every so often the creator of Metal Gear Solid still manages to pop out with an idea or opinion that’s so out of pocket that you can’t help but do a double take. In today’s installment: Kojima’s bored with safe, big-budget titles, and he muses that maybe games would be better if more developers knew how to kill people.
In a far-reaching interview with fashion company SSENSE, Kojima gives his two cents on the gaming industry. To put it bluntly, he’s not impressed. Kojima describes watching Summer Game Fest and its many trailer debuts, but despite the number of games highlighted, many of them seemed samey and boring. Most of what he saw involved fighting aliens or monsters, he says. Meanwhile, as big studios struggle with sales and lay off armies of people, indies are hitting it out of the park.
He laments that “Even the visuals and the systems are pretty much the same.” He gets why games go down this route: People like it. But, he says, it’s “important to put something really new in there for the industry.”
He’s not wrong, but it is funny to hear him say this when Kojima is such a prominent component of Geoff Keighley events like Summer Game Fest. But notably, Kojima doesn’t use the stage to show off action. In his last appearance in the trailer showcase, Kojima introduced a cinematic of Death Stranding 2 that barely provided any context. Instead, the focus was almost entirely on the acting and drama.
“If there is no risk, there won’t be any good things that would be born,” he says later in the interview.
The disappointment with AAA games might explain why Kojima says that actually, he barely plays games at all. For anyone who follows the bespeckled creator on X, that tracks: He mostly posts about movies and music. He likes to visit museums with his son during his free time.
“I could kind of create a game just by watching one painting,” Kojima claims. I suspect we’ll see an indie kick off a game jam with this very theme within the year.
But the most outrageous aspect of the interview is when Kojima casually implies that he’s actually quite deadly, right after bemoaning the state of the gaming industry. The interview describes an incident where Kojima visited a studio to advise on a stealth game, only to walk away feeling lukewarm.
“People who are making military games, they probably don’t know how to dismantle a gun or shoot a gun,” he says. “So that’s kind of sad.” Naturally, he’s asked if he knows how to work a gun himself. He does. Oh, he does.
“Yes, because I’ve been doing this training as well, and I learned so many ways to kill people as well,” Kojima says with zero elaboration. Solid Snake who?? Also: What, exactly, is Kojima training for?
Kojima’s probably right of course, especially when so many games attempt a veneer of realism. But I’m not sure Peak would be better if, say, Aggro Crab actually engaged in some cannibalism before the game’s latest update. Some stuff is probably better left to the imagination.
You can read the full interview, which is rife with some amazing photography and more fantastic quotes, here.
