Who is Joakim Mogren?

The Video Game Awards debuted a trailer for a unknown game called The Phantom Pain, alledgedly by an unknown Swedish studio called Moby Dick Studio.

The trailer itself has plenty of hints pointing to it being a game in the Metal Gear franchise - and rumours of Konami / Kojima Productions people wearing Moby Dick Studio t-shirts at the event soon surfaced. According to the sparse information on the company website, the studio was founded by Joakim Mogren. A common sounding Swedish name, but Joakim is also an anagram for Kojima. The Japanse game director is well known for challenging fans when announcing new games - and using misdirection to create hype.

The Stockholm development community isn't very big. There's a handful of major studios, and maybe a dozen or so smaller ones - a new studio making a major game like The Phantom Pain can't go unnoticed for long. And of course, there is no information to be found on a game developer called Joakim Mogren.

So is The Phantom Pain really Metal Gear Solid 5 or perhaps Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes? We don't know. Geoff Keighley tweeted that The Phantom Pain was a brand new reveal, but then again someone may have been feeding him Doritos of deceipt for all we know.

It would be fun if the charade is maintained for a while longer, it's quite entertaining, but we'll probably hear something official fairly soon.