"My biggest failure is Metal Gear ," Hideo Kojima says. "It's my biggest failure and my biggest success."

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He is speaking in a hotel conference room less than a mile away from The Pentagon, Kojima is celebrating the 25th anniversary of Metal Gear and reflecting on a career that has made him one of the most identifiable video game designers in the industry; one whose work is included in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's The Art of Video Games exhibition.The price of his success has meant he has never been able to free himself from the demands of Metal Gear , a series he never meant to draw out over three decades of his career. And yet, they keep coming, although Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance from Platinum Games has a difficult history, so far as Kojima is concerned.Kojima began his career with Konami in 1986, where he assisted with the production of Penguin Adventure and Antarctic Adventure, games that used forced perspective to simulate 3D environments. In 1987 he was allowed to lead his own project, which would become the Metal Gear for the MSX2 system.Originally meant to be an action title, Kojima quickly ran into trouble with the console's technical limitations. With the hero and two enemies onscreen there was only enough memory left to render two bullets, not an ideal scenario for action. Rather than fight against this limitation, Kojima decided to work with it and chose to make Metal Gear a game about avoiding enemies rather than confronting them.While Kojima has periodically been able to work on other games like Policenauts, Snatcher, Zone of the Enders, and Boktai, none have resonated with fans in quite the same way as Metal Gear. And so he's returned to the series again and again, each time insisting it will be his last."I guess you could say I'm very pleased with all of [the Metal Gear games] and at the same time very displeased with all of them," Kojima says. "Every time I make a new game I put all of my effort completely into that game. It's like putting all your effort into a new child that's being born. Once the project is done I can step back at look at it objectively, which is when I can see a lot of flaws. That's when I start to make a new game that tries to fix some of those flaws."For each new sequel, he's had to invent new ideas to keep himself interested while also testing to see how far he can stretch fan loyalty. "As a creator, I always want to betray fans' expectations," he says. "Games are interactive so it's a little different from a movie, where you can really play around with expectations. With games you still have to interact so you can't completely pull the carpet out from under the players."For example if you give players a car you want to use a steering wheel, you don't want to give players something completely different...If you imagine fan expectations as a straight line down the center, I think there's a certain degree of flexibility where you take freedom to a certain extent and push things as much as possible. I always try and push things as much as possible and get things off center with every game I work on."Part of the uniqueness of Kojima's games have been a willingness to use real world events as the basis for his elaborate conspiracy fantasies--from the Cold War subterfuge in the developing world, which served as the basis for the first Metal Gear, to Metal Gear Solid 3's liberal use of historical footage from the Cuban Missile Crisis and fictionalized phone conversations with Lyndon B. Johnson and Nikita Khrushchev."I don't really shy away from [taboos]," Kojima explains. "As much as possible I want to bring these real life issues to the forefront, so I'm always pushing for that. But at the same time it has to be something that's fun. The game that I'm working on now is dealing with quite a few issues that I feel are pretty delicate and taboo. That's something I want to continue to strive for."While Kojima remains ambitious, much about the industry has changed around him. "When I was young video games weren't established as a medium so we drew inspiration from other things such as music or art and then turned those into games," he says. "At that time there was no clear definition of what a game was. It was our responsibility to take those various elements from other crafts and turn them into something."I think a lot of people are coming to the industry now who have a very concrete vision of what a game should be. They feel that they have to create something within that shape and those boundaries, they seem very limited in their scope and their ideas because of this preconceived notion of how things have to be."It's different from my generation when we were truly creating something new in this form, a new vision of what a game could be."

Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York. His work has appeared in Slate, ABC World News, The Believer, The Daily Beast, Kill Screen, Gamasutra, The New Inquiry, Edge, and Billboard.