Metal Gear Survive – Kojima is gone but not forgotten

Fans have a found a secret reference to Kojima Productions in the new Metal Gear game, along with a less flattering one for the game’s director.

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Metal Gear games are always filled with in-jokes and references, or at least they used to be when series creator Hideo Kojima was in charge.

He famously left (or was asked to leave, it’s still not clear) Konami in 2015 but fans have already found some well-hidden secrets in the recently released Metal Gear Survive.

The tweet below (and this one here) shows how the first letter of the second word in each soldier’s codename spells out the phrase ‘KJP Forever’.


Look at this little tidbit hidden in Metal Gear Survive by a dev. “Kojima Productions Forever” and calling director a bastard and the producer cunning. Nice. pic.twitter.com/BW7bNlcDJi — Jed Whitaker is inside the industry (@Jed05) February 25, 2018

KJP was the internal Konami abbreviation for Kojima Productions, the development studio that Hideo Kojima used to run and which was disbanded when he left – but was then reformed as an independent company to work on the forthcoming Death Stranding.



You’ll also notice that the last two names on the list are ‘Bastard Yota’, which seems to refer to director Yota Tsutsumizaki and ‘Cunning Yuji’, which matches up with co-producer Yuji Korekado.

Whether those references are meant with any malice is open to interpretation, but Konami is likely to be much more upset at the name-dropping of Kojima and his studio. Especially since they went to the trouble of scrubbing references to his name from all the promotional artwork for Metal Gear Solid V.

Reports from around the time of Kojima’s departure suggested that morale at Konami was low across the board, with draconian restrictions on developers’ lunch breaks and email usage. Some were allegedly even forced to work as cleaners and security guards if they displeased upper management.

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