The maker of the legendary series on the pressures of developing a blockbuster and how his games take aim at the US

Hideo Kojima is sitting in a bunker somewhere in the belly of Los Angeles Convention Centre’s booming South Hall. It is a bunker in the literal sense: the space is dressed as a command room, with a metallic studded table and khaki drapes dangling from its cardboard walls. It's a reference to the military locales that have dominated the Metal Gear series – the hugely popular stealth adventures that Kojima has been overseeing for 25 years. This bunker is also a retreat, away from the flash and boom of the E3 show floor, where tens of thousands press, developers, publishers and salespeople jostle for a glimpse of the next big thing in video games.

Kojima’s forthcoming project, Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain, is, if not the next big thing, then a sizeable event. Ever since the 1998 instalment Metal Gear Solid, which re-imagined playground game hide-and-seek as a 3D military infiltration sim, this series has been a major fixture on the video game schedule. Set in a convoluted world of warring special agents and arcane secret services, the highly cinematic adventures mix high-tech robotic weapons with tense interpersonal drama – sort of Robotech meets 24, with a cast list that's almost Shakespearean in its range of interlocking feuds and friendships.

With Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Kojima appears to have contemporarised the series for the next-gen consoles. There’s the loose structure that allows the player, taking on the role of decorated US operative Venom Snake, to tackle its series of open-world missions in a variety of dynamic ways. There are also the controversial themes, which have already been clearly demonstrated in a playable taster of Metal Gear Solid V released earlier in the year, Ground Zeroes, in which players rescued orange jumpsuit-wearing terror suspects from a Guantanamo-esque camp. What is Kojima trying to say?

Not so solid now



Last time we met, the famed designer was in a breezy mood, winking out from beneath his sweeping fringe to discuss his childhood movie-making endeavours and the consternation of his parents at his final chosen profession. But that was during the formative days of The Phantom Pain’s development (after we spoke that time, he beckoned me over to look at a video of a virtual girl in her underwear on his phone, exquisitely rendered and lingeringly presented in the game’s graphical FOX engine – such naïve days).



Today he appears haggard, compressed by a day of group interviews with journalists from around the world, hungry for details he can’t yet give. But it’s more than that. Kojima seems tired from the unique pressure of developing a blockbuster video game in 2014, the pressure of being a small god, setting the rules and dimensions of a world, then filling it with detail, plot, consequence and, in this game’s case, commentary.

“I try to do as much as possible myself,” he tells me, hunched over the table, eyes darkened with jetlag. A silent employee from the game’s publisher films us with a camera mounted on a tripod off to the side: even the PR team is run like a military unit. “I develop the design and construction of the environments and I set the theme and topic from the game and work to ensure that it fits with the game systems. That all has to come from me as the vision holder.” Nevertheless, he admits that, since Metal Gear Solid (which he wrote alone) he has worked alongside smaller teams, split up to handle plot, scenarios and the reams of chatter that occur between enemy soldiers and Snake and his remote team.

Those themes have always been somewhat scattershot. Kojima seems just as comfortable making scatological jokes as he does commenting on nuclear proliferation in his games, even if the resulting tone is uncomfortable and uneven. With Ground Zeroes he escalated the stakes by taking aim at North America’s contemporary policies towards terror suspects. “In the past the US was the centre of the world, where everything was happening,” he says. “I think my stories have always sought to question this, maybe even criticise it. But the situation is changing. America is not seen as the centre of the world any more. So the focus of my stories is shifting alongside with that change in the real world.”

It’s a diplomatic answer, but Ground Zeroes is not an especially diplomatic video game. Its incarcerated terror suspects kneel in wire cages, bound at the hands and feet with blinding sacks over their heads. As you hoist them on to Snake’s shoulder and sprint to the evacuation helicopter, some break down in tears either through fear or relief. It’s grimly political. “[Guantanamo] was definitely something that I made decision to address in the game,” Kojima says. “Hollywood continues to present the US army as being the good guys, always defeating the aliens or foreigners. I am trying to shift that focus. These movies might not be the only way to view current affairs. I am trying to present an alternate view in these games.”

Comedy, cinema and politics



For some, the game’s ground level visual humour undermines Kojima’s loftier political commentary ambitions. In The Phantom Pain enemy soldiers, supplies and even animals can be airlifted back to Snake’s base via an air balloon tied to an ankle that comedically jerks them into the air. Kojima counters the concerns elegantly. “With a movie it’s probably easier to sustain intensity and seriousness over the 90-minute duration,” he says. “But in an open-world game it becomes exhausting, demotivating and even uninteresting for the player. In order to avoid that fatigue, I try to interrupt that heaviness with visual jokes in the world, something to provide the player with some comic relief and change the mood dynamically.”

Kojima is often portrayed as a frustrated film director. He has said that part of the reason he joined Konami in the late 1980s was because of the lack of opportunities in the Japanese film industry. But today he is adamant that he makes games due to the unique opportunities the medium presents for narrative and systems to work in concert. “I love movies but if I was to create a film I’d use different methods,” he says. “I make games. That’s what I do. So I think about ways that I can use the game systems to reinforce my story, or do things that simply aren’t possible in other media.”

He offers the example of Snake’s military base in the forthcoming game. “The message is anti-nuclear weapons,” he says. “But it’s not just about shouting that message at the player.” Instead, he makes the point through non-written means. “Through the game, the player is motivated to make a base and build up their military centre. But at some point, when it reaches a certain size, the world begins to take notice and, in that sense, you become the threat. Countries begin to attack you.



"At this point I give the player the option to think about acquiring a nuclear weapon, in order to deter these attacks, a kind of threat. It illustrates the cycle of nuclear weapons, what inspires people and nations to enter into that system. It’s something that you can only really do in video games.”

The problem with narrative games



There are, however, major challenges that remain for storytellers such as Kojima. “In games it's very difficult to portray complex human relationships,” he says. “Likewise, in movies you often flit between action in various scenes. That’s very difficult to do in games, as you generally play a single character: if you switch, it breaks immersion. The fact that most games are first-person shooters today makes that clear. Stories in which the player doesn’t inhabit the main character are difficult for games to handle.”

Kojima’s games traditionally rely heavily on so-called cutscenes, film-like segments of drama that intersperse the game’s interactive sections. But with The Phantom Pain he hopes to move away from this emphasis, onto the kind of storytelling exemplified by titles such as Gone Home and Dark Souls, in which the player must piece the narrative together from scraps of information and objects that they discover. “The player is able to flesh out the detail and background of the game by discovering and listening to cassette tapes,” he says. “It’s a different way to develop story but one that is arguably, more impactful: the player puts it all together in their mind.”

These creative decisions are, unusually for the creator of a big budget blockbuster, seemingly Kojima’s to make without counsel or compromise. The Metal Gear series is the cornerstone of publisher Konami’s business, on which the company’s continued success rides. As such, Kojima is afforded the position of auteur. Even here, in the riot of E3, the staff around him whisper and tiptoe.



But unquestioned power can bring with it creative stagnation. I ask Kojima whether he has lost some of the fire that, in his untested early days, drove him to make games to prove his detractors wrong. “I agree that it’s far easier for me to get my plans approved these days,” he says. “The company is much more willing to take risks on me and my ideas. But that might be the only thing.”

He argues that his pride to create specific kinds of works to the highest quality remains unchanged after more than two decades. “That desire is pretty much the same as when I started out,” he says. But there are other responsibilities that have come including the grim realisation of the financial responsibility he carries. “The biggest difference might be that I now have the role of producer as well as director. I’m forced to think about the business side of things too. When I was just creating games, I didn’t even have to think about budgets. I didn’t care whether a game was a financial success or not.”

Innocence dies at the hands of experience: so it is for the kidnapped, for the terror detainee, for a tentatively post-nuclear nation and, as he quietly frets in his bunker, for this wearied game director.

Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain is due out on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One in "early 2015".



• Hideo Kojima: video game drop-out – interview part 1

• Hideo Kojima: video game drop-out – interview part 2

• Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes review