As a little boy Hideo Kojima had a pair of constantly working parents. Hideo was often home alone and looked after himself as best he could. so the family TV became his window to the world, watching movies, TV series, soap operas and dramas from around the world.
In a way, they became his upbringing and his lessons in society. Even today, he still turn on the TV as soon as he comes into a new hotel room just to deal with the feelings of loneliness.
Kojima was born in Tokyo, but grew up in the countryside in the western part of Japan. As the youngest, he was often forced to prove his toughness to peers, which
led to many encounters with death early on in his life. On one occasion he nearly drowned, another he was nearly mauled by a dog. He narrowly missed being hit by an express train, and he'd been threatened with a baseball bat. Kojima was five years old and found himself projecting onto the more forgiving world of TV movies.
Years passed and Kojima's parents placed high demands on what he would be as an adult. High on the agenda was of course to obtain a permanent job, and a well-paid one at that.
This was no incentive for the young Hideo, who most wanted to be an artist or illustrator, and who's uncle, who was a great artist, constantly struggled with financial problems.
Even at a young age Hideo began to make up stories. He wrote tales which he sent to newspapers and magazines, hoping to one day be published. The scripts could sometimes be as thick as 400 pages, and dealt with such heady subjects as "mass-state control over ageing, due to global overpopulation". None of his short stories was published.
THE FILM MAKER YEARS
Kojima didn't despair, but instead started shooting movies with his 8MM camera.
The theme of these films were usually police or zombie stories. Kojima was verging on the obsessed with filming. During high school, he and friends tried to arrange screenings of the films, which they charged for. No one came. Kojima had, however, found his calling: he'd be a film maker.
When Kojima became older, he began studying economics at the University of Tokyo. What spare time he had he devoted to his Nintendo Famicom. Some of the favourite games was Shigeru Miyamoto's Super Mario Bros. as well as Yuji Horii's Portopia Serial Murder Case. Sitting in his dorm room, Kojima realised something: games had potential for cinematic storytelling.
They can convey emotions, tell stories, and that's not all. They are also interactive. After four years in college, he decided to shift direction to video game creation. Colleagues questioned his decision, and even his professor asked him to think carefully about whether it really was the right thing to do. It was. In 1986 Kojima began, at 23 years old, working in Konami's MSX home computer department.
Kojima's first time at the company was tough. He was never known to be a good programmer, and none of his ideas interested managers. Kojima was very close to leaving the company several times, but remained nevertheless.
The first role he had was as an assistant director on the game Penguin Adventure, the sequel to Arctic Adventure. After that, he worked on his own project: Lost Warld. A title with a war theme, in which you got to play as a masked female wrestler. Kojima's managers eventually gave up on the bizarre project. Lost Warld closed down six months into production.
RISE OF METAL GEAR
But management wanted a new war game and were willing to give him one last chance. Kojima then came up with the idea of a war game where you could not shoot or fight some enemies, but instead had to sneak past them.
The inspiration came from the Steve McQueen movie The Great Escape, where a collection of allies in WWII try to break out from a German prison camp. Kojima's idea was thus exactly the opposite of what the managers had asked him to do.
Still, Konami invested in the project. Production took off, and once development had progressed to a point that management could test it, it was all too clear: the game had a lot of potential.
The game was eventually called Metal Gear, and was released in 1987 for the MSX2.
The player took the role of Foxhound special agent Solid Snake. His mission was to get into the military base Outer Heaven, located 200 kilometres north of the fictional African country Galzburg, to find out what happened to missing Foxhound agent Gray Fox. The last radio message Gray Fox sent out from the site, before contact was broken, consisted of only two words: "Metal Gear".
Unlike all other action games at this time, Metal Gear hadn't you mowing down enemies with a automatic weapon. Snake was at a clear disadvantage against soldiers at Outer Heaven, with starting equipment consisting only of a package of contraband cigarettes. If discovered by a guard, they'd sound an alarm. Kill the, and they were quickly replaced by new ones. To fight them was nothing more than a desperate impasse.
As if that was not enough, the military base also contained electric floors, infrared rays, gas-filled rooms, trapdoors, minefields and bosses in the form of helicopters and super soldiers - all of which stood in the way of Snake's mission. Yet when the player freed Gray Fox, the whole world turned upside down.
Metal Gear turned out to be a nuclear weapon-carrying tank. A machine capable of firing a nuclear warhead from anywhere on the Earth's surface. A terrible weapon in the wrong hands. In addition, the mastermind behind the whole operation was none other than Snake's mentor and Foxhound leader, Big Boss.
With Metal Gear Kojima pulled inspiration from movies, TV shows and other pop culture. The game concept came from The Great Escape, the name Snake was taken from Kurt Russell's character Snake Plisken in the movie Escape from New York, while the cover of the game was copied directly from promotional images of James Cameron's Terminator. The whole adventure was a map of Kojima's childhood, with the biggest reference the creation of Metal Gear itself. This monster machine was modelled after Japan's biggest icon, also a horrible by-product of nuclear weaponry: Godzilla.
"I didn't grow up during World War II, but my parents did. They experienced the bombing of Tokyo and remember the time when the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Events that they never forgot. And so I too don't want the world to forget Metal Gear."
Metal Gear was a critical and box office success in Japan and Europe. It'd created a new stealth genre. Hideo Kojima had gone from being a washout to be hailed as the company's new rising star.
THE BLACK SHEEP
While Kojima began development of his next game, cyberpunk adventure Snatcher, the Metal Gear license fell into the hands of developer Ultra Games, known for NES game Skate or Die, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Under their watch, Metal Gear became the anthesis of what had went before.
They thought to develop a stand-alone sequel to the game, Snake's Revenge, which had more in common with action game Contra than Metal Gear. Fans wept blood and begged to all that was holy that Kojima would return to the series. Which he did, at least for one more game.
The true Metal Gear sequel, Metal Gear: Solid Snake, was initially only released in Japan but was absolutely everything and more that the fans wanted. The game was bigger in every way and this time had a much more confident Hideo Kojima in the director's chair.
The adventure was more difficult but also deeper. It played with the player's expectations and offered a long string of creative ideas. Above all it had a new focus on the game's storyline. The script was much larger, with more characters and story threads. Metal Gear: Solid Snake, however, would prove to be just a prototype of what was to come in the future, for when the technology caught up with Kojima's creative vision.
During the development of his next adventure, Policenauts, Kojima began to hear more and more persistent rumours about Sony's new console, the Playstation. When he realised the enormous power the console offered, he knew that it was again time to dust off his old agent Snake. Kojima and Konami started developing the next part of the saga of Metal Gear with a simple, yet infinitely difficult goal: "best PlayStation game ever."
METAL GEAR SOLID
Yoji Shinkawa, who distinguished himself during the development of Policenauts was promoted by Kojima to the art director for the project. Along with Kojima he created the now iconic Metal Gear visual style.
The classic American tone, with G. I. Joe-like soldiers and environments, was scrapped. Instead the tone changed towards darker colours and Shinkawa's peculiar West-meets-East blend of stylised realism. The result was unveiled at the 1997's E3.
Metal Gear Solid grappled the spotlight from a host of blockbusters showing that year, that included Banjo-Kazooie, Goldeneye, Starfox 64, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Final Fantasy VII and even The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
In Metal Gear Solid, members of Foxhound had rebelled against their superiors during a training mission on Shadow Moses Island, Alaska. Their new leader was Liquid Snake, and their goal was to get hold of Metal Gear Rex, a new model of the dreaded nuclear tank.
With the entire world now in danger U.S. Secretary of Defence asked former leader of Foxhound, Roy Campbell, to take care of the situation. Campbell knew there was only one person in the world who would manage to infiltrate Shadow Moses and the organisation that once been his family: Solid Snake.
Metal Gear Solid may have been both the series and Kojima's first steps into the third dimension, but it stuck true to the formula. The camera was locked, giving Snake and the player the most strategic overview of the area, or a cinematically pleasing angle. There was also a first-person mode that the player could go into to survey the terrain. The radar system from Metal Gear: Solid Snake had now been upgraded to The Soliton Radar System, which was so advanced that it could even figure out the vision for the patrolling soldiers.
Metal Gear Solid was and is one of the most cinematic experiences in the medium. Every part of the game is so elaborate that it could be used as the blueprint for how to combine storytelling with gameplay. The tension of hiding from the enemy. Euphoria when you successfully manoeuvre through a room unnoticed. The battle with Revolver Ocelot. The ketchup bottle in the prison cell. The encounter with Psycho Mantis, as he reads your memory card to see what games you like. The entire game was a long cavalcade of scenes that are classic gaming moments.
Metal Gear Solid was also the first game where Kojima and Konami started working with a contrived theme for the games. The theme for Metal Gear Solid was genetics. What is it that makes us who we are? Foxhound's real goal was to get the dead Big Boss's body, and thus use his soldier genes to produce the ultimate army of soldiers. An army that both Solid and Liquid Snake are already the first sons of. History prophesied a future where the genes are no longer confined within the typical model of family tree, but instead could be spread freely.
Today Metal Gear Solid is often classed not just as "the best Playstation game ever," but one of the most important games in general, both through the popularisation of the stealth genre and through professionally directed cut scenes.
And so questions of a sequel began. At 2000's E3, fans would have every reason to redouble their longing for the series.
Come back on the 27th, as we conclude our massive Metal Gear retrospective as we cover the last twelve years of Metal Gear.