PR Representatives Tried to Make Sure Hideo Kojima Wasn’t Quoted Preferring the PS4 Out of Context

Giuseppe Nelva June 25, 2013 7:30 AM EST

Hideo Kojima’s upcoming open world game Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain opened Microsoft’s press conference at E3, and Kojima himself was very generous in praising the console’s graphical capabilities and Kinect on Xbox Live Director of Programming Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb’s channel, but he has also gone on record with the Japanese press about the PS4’s “cheap” price point.

During a sit down with a group of western journalists, two Konami PR representatives and a translator, Kojima (very possibly joking) went a bit further, as revealed in the writeup of the interview by Gamereactor.

I think I’ll buy both. But at the same time they’ll probably send them to me, But from the price point probably PS4.

The comment caused an explosion of hilarity in the room and could have been seen as an indirect endorsement of the PS4 over the rival, especially if the joking tone (don’t they say that good jokes normally have a foundation in reality?) wasn’t reported, so the PR representatives probably felt that they had to do something about it.

At the end of the session they reportedly “chased down” the interviewer to make sure that the quote mentioned above was not reported out of context and without specifying that it was a joke. The damage control attempt didn’t really work that well anyway, as the comment about the PS4 being cheap was still all over the Japanese press (I’ve seen it at least on three different prominent media outlets), and didn’t look like a Joke at all. If it is really a jest, quite evidently Kojima really likes that punch line a lot.

While I’ll chalk this as a rumor, considering that the episode has been reported only by a single journalist (even if a credible one), it’s definitely a funny story, and begs the question on whether the deal between Konami and Microsoft is limited only to opening the latter’s conference, or if there’s something else afoot.

What do you think? Are we going to see some kind of Xbox One timed exclusivity or exclusive content? Or the PR representatives were just being considerate? With this kind of things you really never know.