The Kojima Code

This book discusses the following games:

Metal Gear

Snatcher

Snake’s Revenge

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake

Policenauts

Metal Gear Solid

Metal Gear Solid: Integral

Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions

Metal Gear: Ghost Babel

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2

Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance

All rights and characters related to these games are property of KONAMI.

This book is a commentary and analysis which, in part, studies the stories and characters contained in these games. The author in no way claims to own the rights related to them. He has included quotes and story details purely for analytical and review purposes, and recommends that readers buy these classic games to experience their interactive nature. This will help the reader to appreciate the book’s analysis as well!

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

part one

Chapter 1

HIDEO KOJIMA

FORMATIVE YEARS

ECONOMICS AND PENGUINS

Chapter 2

METAL GEAR (1987)

STEALTH ACTION

PLOT AND EVENTS

Closing In

GAMEPLAY HIGHLIGHTS

A TALE OF TWO VERSIONS

THE MANUAL

OVER ONE MILLION

Chapter 3

SNATCHER (1988)

PASSION AND CONTROL

ROUGH GEM

PUSHING IT

Chapter 4

SNAKE’S REVENGE (1990)

THE TRAIN RIDE HOME

CONTRA-ADDICTION

JUNGLE OF CONFUSION

Chapter 5

METAL GEAR 2: SOLID SNAKE (1990)

THE LOST CHAPTER

OLD DOG OF WAR, NEW TRICKS

PLOT AND EVENTS

A Tour of Strangeness

A Pair of Foxes

Faceoff

Going Home

GAMEPLAY HIGHLIGHTS:

ACTION!

IDENTITY THEFT

Chapter 6

POLICENAUTS (1994)

2042: A BUDDY-COP ODYSSEY IN SPACE

DIVISION 5

Chapter 7

AMERICA

SNAKE IS BACK

Chapter 8

METAL GEAR SOLID (1998)

A DOSE OF REALITY

A DOSE OF INSPIRATION

A DOSE OF CONCEIT

PLOT AND EVENTS

Hostages

Meryl and Emmerich

Mind Games

Femme Fatale

The FOXHOUND Treatment

Communications Towers A & B

Howling in the Storm

Big Bird

Snakes and Ladders

The Big Twist

It’s Personal (and Genetic)

From Darkness to Light

The Otacon Ending

GAMEPLAY HIGHLIGHTS:

THE AFTERMATH OF METAL GEAR SOLID

Cutting-Edge Retro Puzzle Movie

Troubles

The Wildest Movie You’ll Ever Play

Wetwork Network

Pioneers and Patriarchs

The Shallow End of the Meme Pool

Virtual Indulgence

The Betrayal of Jeremy Blaustein

Revelations 22:10

Chapter 9

METAL GEAR: GHOST BABEL (2000)

part TWO

Chapter 10

METAL GEAR SOLID 2: SONS OF LIBERTY (2001)

FAN FICTION

The Yellow Brick Road

THE SELFISH MEME

Blockbuster By Day

Postmodern Betrayal By Night

CRASHING THE SERVERS

E3 2000

Trial Edition & E3 2001

THE UNDERCURRENT

September 2001, New York City

PLOT ANALYSIS

A Dark, Stormy Night Aboard The Discovery

Getting Silly

Scott Dolph, the Commandant

The Slow, Sickening Revelation

Deja Vu

The Rosemary Factor

A Beautiful Day For a Mission

Hallway of Horrors / Aliased Ally

A Nightmare You Can’t Wake Up From

Defusing Tension

Drama Queen

Fatman

Back to the Simulation

PSG-1 and Harrier

Fictional Legend and Shell Two

Shadow Government

Vamp and Emma

Goodbye Big Shell, Hello Arsenal

You Must Continue Your M-Mission

Deeper Into The Bowels of Madness

Final Confrontations

Sea of Garbage

Fighting the Ex-President Atop Federal Hall in a Sword Duel

Happy Ending

DIGESTING PLASTIC

CONTROLLED DEMOLITION

SORTING OUT THE WRECKAGE

Passwords

Real Inspirations

The Hidden Ending

WORLD WAR WEB

Intellectual Lockdown

Chapter 11

METAL GEAR SOLID 2: SUBSTANCE (2003)

LET THEM EAT SNAKE

THE FINAL MISSION

A Mission Is A Mission

Parallel Universe

The Princess of Hell & The Prince of Chaos

Winning the Mission

Say It In Song

Chapter 12

THE GREAT PARADOX

BURIED NUKE

FREEDOM FIGHTER

Foreword

Ravi Singh

Editor-in-Chief, The Snake Soup

Most conversations about Hideo Kojima don’t get into what I think makes his work so special. That’s why I don’t advertise being a huge fan in my personal life, although anyone who sees my bookshelf will notice the bulk of the games that I do own have the words METAL and GEAR in their titles

I wanted to be involved with a deeper discussion so I created The Snake Soup, one of the longest-running fansites online. I’ve had job interviewers stoked about seeing The ‘Soup on my resume and suddenly want to talk about Kojima with me. I’ll play along if I’m still interested in the job at that point, but there’s more to these games than great gameplay and characters.

Kojima’s games deserve meaningful conversation. Over the years the fan community has attracted thinkers who are willing to look beyond the games themselves and dig into things like meta-narrative. When Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was released in 2001, most people just wanted to vent about how much they hated its plot and a particular lead character. Yet online within the fan community, people were dissecting it and coming up with theories about Kojima’s controversial choices in storytelling; choices that were absolutely nuts at first glance. The meaning behind the madness was only found when people dug deeper.

One of these people was Terry Wolfe, whose interpretations were unprecedented. I may have disagreed with his conclusions, but it was the sort of analysis that caught my interest; a look outside the box. Wolfe’s theories ignited discussions and interpretations that didn’t exist prior. He helped show that Sons of Liberty is a great example of Kojima’s use of meta-narrative. Today it’s recognized as a work of postmodernism, and this is thanks to folks like Wolfe.

As Kojima continued to offer more than what meets the eye, Wolfe continued his interpretive work and eventually started his own fansite to share it. His theories, analysis, speculation and in-depth interpretations have grown with the series. His site’s name uses the appropriate pun Meta Gear to capture his meta-narrative focus.

For those of us who love this sort of thing, Wolfe delivers. For anyone yet to learn about the fascinating work of Hideo Kojima and the deeper discussion it deserves, I believe this book will deliver.

Preface

Hideo Kojima is a Japanese video game designer, writer, director, and producer who has been involved with many standout titles over the span of his career, but is best known for his groundbreaking Metal Gear series. This book is a study of both Kojima himself and his body of work up to 2003, when the first epoch of his career ended.

Devout fans of Hideo Kojima would love an exhaustive analysis of the fictional worlds he has brought to life, but that’s beyond the scope of what this book aims to do. If given two-thousand pages and four volumes I might be able to do them all justice, but you wouldn’t want to buy that. Even modern wiki databases fail to properly organize all the information contained in these games despite having unlimited pages and being collaboratively updated by dozens if not hundreds of dedicated and knowledgeable fans. At the same time, I’m sure game design enthusiasts would love a deep study of the psychology and engineering behind each game’s many mechanics and systems. I would love to provide it, but in its own dedicated place outside of this book. We don’t want to obscure our premise by getting off track.

The middle ground between all of this is the average player’s general experience, which we can comment on and explore. Kojima’s personal mentality during development, the moments we remember while playing, and the official interviews given by production staff will serve as a trusty foundation to build our theory upon, but that’s all they are: a foundation. Our theory is based on facts, but it’s the speculation we want. The Kojima Code is unauthorized and unofficial, and some of the ideas directly contradict statements of the people involved. I’m guessing that if you wanted nothing more than the official story you’d read Wikipedia, so that’s fine. The Kojima Code is a belief in a secret layer of mind games and meta-commentary that has evolved in Hideo Kojima’s games over decades and been woven into what would otherwise be called be straightforward entertainment. An untold story, waiting to be interpreted. I’m proud to make the case for it here.

Acknowledgments

Jeremy Blaustein

and Agness Kaku,

for your valuable time and insight.

Alex Delia

and my siblings,

for all the support and feedback from beginning to end.

& Lee Taggart

Introduction

In the modern age, gaming has become the king of the entertainment world. It now rakes in more money and soaks up more quality time than any other entertainment medium in existence.¹ This has earned it some prominent enemies, as well as some unlikely champions.

Today’s average gamer may not remember the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons was assaulted by evangelicals who feared that the pen-and-paper hobby was a gateway into mysticism and the occult, but it stands as an early example of children’s games being demonized as serious social problems. It spread across society like wildfire, fueled by half-informed observations and the occasional unverified shock story about what could happen when you started rolling the dice. Parents didn’t want their kids turning into sedentary, antisocial nerds playing out unhealthy fantasies in simulated worlds; they didn’t have anything like that when they were growing up. Before long, video games showed up and added graphics, sound effects, and controllers into the mix. Gruesome and suggestive video games started making waves in the 1990s and a similar vanguard emerged to protect the young, only this time from the political left. Fearing that games had an even more insidious power to corrupt the minds of the youth, some worried about a wave of degeneracy and crime sprees based on the availability of murder simulators. Outspoken senators discussed how to regulate such a dangerous industry, but this only made these mature video games seem even more rebellious and cool.

Opponents of video games and the free market have come and gone over the decades, but only a handful have managed to make a dent. By now there’s a slew of highly lucrative video games inspired by that evil old Dungeons & Dragons hobby, and fans look forward to seeing how the new virtual reality tech will allow one to lose themselves in such worlds on a whole new level. It seems video games have won the war. They still have plenty of resistance from other sects of society, however. The old fight about morality and decency has been replaced by a new fight about political correctness—you know, the endless struggle for equality, diversity, and the promise of a Nanny State that gets regurgitated by students of Critical Theory and Cultural Marxism. The difference between the old opponents and the new is that the new opponents aren’t on the fringes; they’re embedded into the liberal institutions that dominate academia and journalism. They aren’t showing much sign of success either. Both sides of the culture war have tried to either kill or control gaming in some way, and yet it’s thrived. Japan’s immunity to Western ideologues is partly to thank for that, since they’ve always been one of the biggest producers of video games in the world.

The controversial rise of gaming has been responsible for almost as much destruction as creation when it comes to business. There is an ecological balance to hobbies after all, a zero-sum effect that starves out the weak and feeds the strong. Gaming has taken a bite out of practically every pastime and leisure activity in the world, and with the saturation of smartphones its appetite has only grown. To underestimate gaming’s encroachment into the free time of both kids and adults is to be out of touch with modern society. It is currently dominating the hobbies of multiple generations, and although doomsayers are always calling for its demise, it only gets bigger—even if not in sales numbers, then certainly in time spent. Just count the number of collective hours people spend watching Twitch streams if you have doubts.²

This unstoppable phenomenon was built over time by many people, but at its root it all boils down to a handful of strange visionaries who dared to take the medium to places nobody saw coming. The bold direction of certain key video game titles inspired waves of clones, iterations, and new creative generations who wanted to recapture those sparks. These leaders also shielded the medium as a whole from being dismissed as a shallow hobby by evolving it into something bigger and more meaningful through the power of their innovations in game design and storytelling. Without question, the subject of our book is one of those celebrated visionaries.

However, in a cruel twist of irony, his story is more about tragic survival than heroic leadership; more about subversion and opportunism than altruism. In the early days of his career it was about establishing himself as something that couldn’t be replicated or dispensed with in an industry where job security can be a joke. The better we understand the condemnation of gaming, the more we’ll appreciate the extraordinary measures taken by Hideo Kojima in his career’s infancy to create something historically redeeming.

This condemnation manifested in part as bogus scientific studies declaring gaming to be a toxic and dangerous obsession for antisocials. Although these studies weren’t founded on science, they accomplished their true task, which was to persuade mainstream society into thinking that gamers were losers and to give them labels with which to attack gamers and their hobby. Rather than investigating the appeal of gaming and communicating it to outsiders, the whole medium was categorized as a problematic addiction centered around violent fantasy fulfillment. To this day, the gaming industry itself touts escapism as one of their finest features, despite a history of healthy social activities, education value, and even reflex and dexterity development. Many of the best surgeons are gamers, after all.

Even without propaganda against it, however, it’s easy to see why gaming became undesirable to the average person in the years following the epic 1983 collapse of the industry, known as the Video Game Crash of 1983.³ The most obvious culprit? It may have been the marketing strategy some may remember from TV and magazines, in which gaming companies deliberately targeted boys in their ads. The bizarre lengths to which gaming ads went in order to ostracize females and pander to boys is enough to make one pause and wonder if the firms hired to make these ads didn’t have ulterior motives. Blatantly sexist, anti-women slogans, images, and concepts directly pit games (and by extension, gamers) against women, with games being marketed as the winner boys ought to choose. Then again, pandering to males made the most logical sense in some ways. The ‘90s wave of feminism was perceived as no-fun-allowed political correctness, and the aggressive attempt to show women as superior to men was taken as provocation by iconic voices in the world of stand-up comedy, which dominated the discussion of current events at the time. The men-versus-women debate was a hallmark of ‘90s culture, explored everywhere. Why shouldn’t games help men fight back, or at least cope?

Even before the embarrassing ads of the ‘90s, however, we can find stronger roots for the juvenile and overly masculine streak of the industry in the arcade scene, which was notorious for exemplifying these traits. The massive spread of arcades was born out of addictive games like Frogger (1981), Pac-Man (1980), and Space Invaders (1978), which challenged players to beat high scores publicly. This made the games competitive, even though you didn’t directly play against other players in simultaneous, head-to-head competition. As arcade owners tracked which games swallowed the most quarters, they ordered more machines, and as they ordered more machines, the trend was set. Before long, everyone involved realized that competitive games and eye-catching visuals were the key to enticing gamers to make return visits. The publishers saw which machines were being sold the most and funded more games that fit the bill. Eventually this led to oppressive difficulty levels, violent head-to-head racing and fighting games, and primal arenas in which high school delinquents could do virtual battle. It became a culture of ego, hostility, and often foul odors since smoking indoors hadn’t been banned yet. Women just weren’t into that level of combat and obsession.

The critics had a point. The skill required to be a part of the arcade scene weeded out the weak and left only the strong to survive, no matter how pale and malnourished their physical forms may have been. Accordingly, the themes and stories of arcade games were designed to appeal to this notion and heighten the drama. High-stimulus action was engineered to bombard the senses with flashing explosions and constantly pulsing rifles, or iconic fighting move phrases shouted out to intrigue the passerby. Legends were born and epic rivalries were forged in cities across the nation! It turned out that exploiting age-old alpha male instincts was a big winner and ditching women was simply a sacrifice that needed to be made.

As home consoles started to appear, the biggest arcade games simply got ported onto them. The library of games offered by consoles therefore naturally skewed in the same direction as the arcades and had to be advertised to the same audience. Console creators saw where the industry was headed and appealed to the publishers by promising them a second source of income. Kids and loners could stay at home and play. Young children weren’t old enough to hang out at some types of arcades anyway, and wouldn’t have the money to challenge the local champions. Many kids couldn’t even reach the controls, but they still knew about the glory of the scene and wanted to take part somehow. This is also why console manufacturers included multiple controllers in the box, to make sure they were compatible with the arcade hits that featured head-to-head play. The Power Set bundle of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) released in North America in 1989 featured an arcade-like Zapper gun controller, as well as a floor mat controller that let you play by stepping on large buttons. It was marketed as a family-friendly toy to avoid the stigma of the video game label so soon after the Video Game Crash of 1983, and for the sake of appealing to conservative Reagan era parents.

As home consoles advanced with better ports and new exclusive titles, the little boys who wanted to visit the arcades became teenagers who stopped caring about the glory of the arena quite as much. Games became more insular, private, and therefore antisocial. Again, the critics had a point. Games designed around consoles or personal computers were quite different from the arcade classics, and they often had gentler edges and more inspired stories, but this didn’t change the perception that games were still for punks and weirdos who wanted to compensate for something lacking in their real lives. As it turned out, kids and punks didn’t mind this perception.

The advent of the Internet and its nascent net culture meant that any demonization of the gamer demographic would only end up driving them to seek refuge online. Aside from being a valuable tool, it also served as a form of retreat. Gamers were forced to create communities and services to suit their needs because nobody else would, and if society didn’t want them, they would band together and fend for themselves. Before long, a cottage industry was born out of the necessity and desire to support gamers and their interests, putting the gaming industry ahead of the curve in the new frontier of online business. Tech-savvy gamers and programmers utilized the Internet sooner and better than anyone else, and thus the Internet became the home of gamers and their source of hope for a brighter future. Of course, the Internet itself was demonized by the same ideologues as a place for anonymous freaks and perverts, and its virtues were ignored while its vices were played up for the masses; it too posed an enormous threat to the old media empires. The Internet generation has since become synonymous with the gamer generation, and their destinies have remained intertwined.

It doesn’t help that during this period, games never even tried to be relevant to modern culture at large in the same way that movies and TV did. They didn’t join the social conversation around hot topics or dramatize the human condition. They didn’t push agendas and thereby receive the loud approval of snobs, activist groups, and scholars. Hollywood would never consider them art. They were good at making lots of money and killing a lot of free time, but that was about it—disposable junk food for the mind, mostly. Yet again, the critics did have a point. Today we can see that even as their ability to tell increasingly complex stories has developed, games still seem to be behind the times and unable to compete with the narrative and artistic power of traditional media, and they often tend to satisfy themselves instead with ripping off other aspects of pop culture. For those who’ve tried to turn gaming into a respectable contributor to and member of the artistic world, it’s been a long and tiresome road.

No matter how awkwardly gaming may fit into modern culture, the fervent subculture surrounding Hideo Kojima’s blockbuster gaming franchise Metal Gear is even more at odds. This is because it’s filled with its own would-be intellectuals who reject the gamer stereotypes even as they so often embody them. They acknowledge this and try very hard to fight against negative perceptions, aspiring toward something higher and deeper. Their tragic failure, and the failure of Hideo Kojima to dredge the average gamer out of his toxic subculture and narrow-mindedness, all despite his tremendous efforts toward that end, are at the heart of this book.

You might wonder what makes Metal Gear special and sets it apart from its contemporaries. For starters, it’s the longest-running big budget production that’s ever been written and directed by one person, telling one ongoing story, in the history of modern entertainment.⁴ Star Wars may have spanned more decades and arguably told a more epic tale, but the movies weren’t all written and directed by George Lucas. Mad Max bounced back into the spotlight with a fourth installment after spending thirty years in stasis, but despite having one writer-director for them all, they don’t form a continuous story. Metal Gear is an anomaly, if not a miracle of perseverance. It has eight increasingly divergent main installments, released over the course of almost three decades across six different game platforms, and yet they all share one enormous fictional timeline and one creative voice—and none of it was planned ahead of time.

Think about that for a moment. If you’re already beginning to picture a towering house of cards held together with nonsense and contradiction, you’re not alone. The words incomprehensible and convoluted are two of the most common descriptors for the series’ plot. You don’t need to worry about all that, however. Although we’ll be looking at Kojima’s stories and the impact they had in the video game industry when they were released, the plots and all of their finer details are far from the point of this book, and in fact, they’re not even the point of the games themselves. We’re more interested in the themes, personal touches, and behind-the-scenes stories embedded within the games waiting to be discovered between the lines. We want to explore the unspoken Kojima Code as it evolves slowly over the course of his work.

Whether you’re a diehard member of the cult of Hideo Kojima or you’ve never heard of him before, you’ll be able to appreciate the secret, unofficial story behind the beloved game designer’s journey into acclaim and notoriety. It’s a story of ambition, struggle, and genius in an industry somehow more shamed than pornography, yet more popular than TV. Kojima’s story is one of success, fame, cynicism, delusion, and depression that ultimately fueled a secret war against his own fans. It’s about death threats, manipulation, and madness after a dream come true. It’s the story of a lonely Japanese nobody who fought to be a famous creator, and the story of a famous creator who turned against his own legacy in one of the strangest ways imaginable.

Kojima’s is a story hidden in coded messages: hence the title of this book. Throughout the following pages, we will explore the origins of a rabbit hole so deeply layered and so unexpected that it’s been overlooked by millions of devoted fans for over a decade. We’re going to unlock the allegory of Metal Gear and shine a light on its darkest depths. Let me assure you, I’m not here to convince you that the series tells a great story, or even that the games are worth playing. This is not a fan tribute, but a guide to familiarize you with the controversy, myths, and motives of the man who made some of the most groundbreaking and controversial video games of all time. If you haven’t experienced these games before, prepare to find out what would have missed if you had. If you’re a loyal veteran of the series, prepare to enter a new level of understanding. If you played them and thought they were garbage, prepare to have your criticisms validated, your assumptions challenged, and your mind opened.

1 Although exact figures are impossible to track, global video game revenue in 2016 is estimated to have reached $99.6 billion by Newzoo, whereas global box office revenue was about a third of that, bringing in $38.3 billion, according to Statista.

Newzoo: https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/global-games-market-reaches-99-6-billion-2016-mobile-generating-37/

Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/259987/global-box-office-revenue/

2 Twitch is a popular online streaming service where users can share a video feed of themselves playing games with other people while chatting. It was purchased by Amazon for $970 million cash in 2014. In 2015, viewers watched a collective total of 241,441,823,059 minutes of games on this site alone, which equals 459,366 years worth of time.

3 Revenue for game companies dropped 97 percent over the course of two years, putting many game companies out of business and causing video games to be abandoned by investors.

4 Although other writers have helped Hideo Kojima in the writing department, especially with the enormous amount of dialogue and optional conversations in the games, he is the main writer responsible for deciding the plot and substance of the stories. He takes credit first and foremost, and has the final say on what the stories will be. There are also several spin-off games not written and directed by Kojima, but these are not considered proper installments in the main franchise.

part one

Chapter 1

HIDEO KOJIMA

FORMATIVE YEARS

Hideo Kojima was born in 1963 in Tokyo. He wouldn’t stay there long as his wealthy family moved from one city to another until he was four, when they settled in the Kansai region of Japan, in Osaka. There he would spend his youth and begin a love affair with stories, which would define the rest of his life.⁵

Born from the generation that experienced World War II, he heard stories about war from his father growing up. Although his father had been too young to join the military, it hadn’t stopped him from experiencing the horrors of total war firsthand. As it was for so many other victims of war who were lucky enough to make it out alive, these traumatic memories were passed down to the next generation, entrusted to inspire some better kind of future. Kojima learned about his father carrying wounded children to bomb shelters while American planes ripped apart Japan’s capital from the skies. His father admitted that he despised Japan’s involvement in the war, but he also wished he could have done his part to protect his homeland. Perhaps too young to fully comprehend, Hideo Kojima was taught what it meant to hate your enemy while also opposing the conflict itself. The paradox became nestled in his mind as the Cold War dragged on throughout his childhood years.

Of course, there was much more to Kojima’s youth than war stories and nuclear threat. Before his family moved to Osaka he had enjoyed playing outdoors, and he explored nature compulsively. That all changed when his days of living in a small city next to the ocean were replaced by a vast urban setting, and he turned to TV to find amusement and the feeling of exploring worlds. His parents were busy people who couldn’t spend much time with him, but in Osaka they began a tradition of watching a full movie with him every night, and they wouldn’t let him go to bed until he had finished watching it. Despite their shared love of film, he sensed they would never approve of his ambition to be an artist for a living; such a thing was highly stigmatized in Japan. Pursuing an independent creative job was considered a foolish risk, and his parents conformed to the old, conservative way of thinking. He never shared his dream of being a serious filmmaker with them.

However, he had a friend who was willing to lend him an 8mm camcorder so he could try making films. Kojima and his friends traveled together to various locations and spent time trying to film amateur zombie flicks. His parents indulged him to the point of funding a trip to an island where the kids hoped to make a more serious piece of art. Instead, they ended up wasting their time enjoying nature and swimming away from the stuffy city, only whipping up another zombie movie on the last day so it didn’t look like a scam. He may have wanted to genuinely make a film, but his creative passion wasn’t shared by the others. This wouldn’t stop him from pushing forward, however.

At age ten his parents began giving him money to go see movies by himself, but only on the condition that he come home afterward and carefully discuss the themes and direction with them. According to Kojima, he walked around daydreaming all day, developing a bad habit of wandering into obstacles and losing himself in imagination.⁶ Needless to say, he was immersed in the world of fiction and possibility.

Then, when Hideo Kojima was thirteen, his father passed away. The hatred of America instilled in his father’s heart at a young age had long been replaced with a new appreciation for Western culture, as foreign films inspired him to open his mind and spread the interest to the rest of his family. It was a way of reconciling with the world beyond Japan. Despite the scars and trauma that all victims of war carry, he had the strength to reach out to his former enemy’s culture through film, and he couldn’t hate what he found in the process. He fell in love with it, and in the process, Hideo witnessed a lesson of overcoming vengeance with peace that he has carried with him to this day, saying that he walks the same ambiguous tightrope as his father.⁷

Thus, during the crucial years of his puberty, Kojima was deprived of one of his biggest creative mentors and sources of inspiration. He had watched his father sculpt and create miniatures as a boy, and was given advice about how to do it himself. Regularly reading a broad range of novels was another hobby inherited from his father, but now the other creative force in the household aside from himself was gone.

He went through his teenage years feeling alone. His mother had to work all day, which meant that he became a latchkey kid. He would return home from school to an empty house, quiet and solitary. Perhaps at times like these he reflected on death’s unforeseen ripple effect. He had been visited by death a few times already: once when he nearly drowned, another time when he was mauled by a vicious dog, and yet another time when he narrowly avoided being hit by a speeding train. He wouldn’t be allowed to forget about the fragility of life, no matter how much he kept his head in the clouds.

Like many children who are left to look after themselves, television became increasingly important. When he watched movies and TV, he wasn’t alone. With TV there was sound, activity, and ideas happening—not the vacuum of life, which has a tendency to turn the grieving mind to mournful reflection. By entering different worlds full of different people, the young Kojima could feel things he’d never be able to on his own. He could visit the future, the past, and places he never knew existed. He could feel the tension of another person’s struggle and sympathize with the lives of fictional characters far removed from the lonely house in which he sat. Even today, much later in life and after becoming a world-famous game designer, he continues to turn on the TV for accompaniment as soon as he gets to his room, no matter where he travels.

Hideo Kojima was able to use the lessons he learned from his father’s death to strengthen his determination to become a filmmaker and push him toward his goal with greater drive and a newfound level of passion.

ECONOMICS AND PENGUINS

Knowing it wasn’t feasible to enter the film industry without a credit to his name, Kojima had been writing stories and submitting them to magazines for years, even before his 8mm filming days. Writing novels had been his hobby, but he never found success in them. His massive four-hundred page stories were never published, in part because magazines were looking for stories less than a hundred pages long—an early sign of his struggle with brevity that would become a common point of contention for his critics many years later. On top of such rejection, a voice of discouragement came from a relative of his: a struggling artist whose complaints Kojima would later blame for holding him back. Everybody he met told him to focus on something more realistic. Even his film friends planned to move on to higher education and safe careers like they were supposed to.

Finding nothing but closed doors, he decided to play it safe until he found the right opportunity to enter the creative field, so he went to college and studied economics. Yet no opportunity came. He did, however, play quite a few video games while he was there. The system known as the Famicom—Nintendo’s first home console—was popular at the time. The more he played video games, the more he loved the way interactivity immersed the player into the world designed by the creator. Interaction and storytelling could be used to enhance one another. Super Mario Bros. (1985) and The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983), a groundbreaking murder mystery adventure game released only in Japan, were particularly inspiring to him and gave him the idea of going into a new field. Thus, Kojima left college. Uninterested in economics and keenly aware of a new industry in need of talent, he sought out the only game company listed on the stock market: Konami.

Everybody warned him not to enter the video game industry, and although his mother supported his decision, it didn’t stop him from feeling the stigma of shame surrounding game development. It wasn’t considered a proper job, but that didn’t matter to Kojima; he didn’t want a proper job. He saw video games as an artistic medium that could use a creative storyteller like himself.

The 1980s were a whirlwind of experiments and guesswork in the game industry, with success and failure waiting around every other corner. Not only in Japan, but all over the world it had practically become a symbol of instability, despite the popularity of the Famicom—redesigned and rebranded as the Nintendo Entertainment System when it was released in North America—thanks to the disastrous Video Game Crash of 1983. Flooded by low-quality titles and a string of failed investments, the bubble burst.⁸ Those who remained in the industry were just picking themselves back up from the dirt. Something needed to change. Executives needed to be shrewd, strict, and productive if they wanted to overcome the sloppy gold rush mentality of the pre-crash industry. Safe bets and quality hits were in demand.

Kojima’s job application was rejected several times, because while he had an abundance of ideas, he lacked any of the technical skills needed to actually make games. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, though, and eventually they took him on as a planner’s assistant.

His first assignment was the sequel to an MSX Computer title called Antarctic Adventure, which had been a success in Japan. Since then the MSX2 had replaced the original, and while Kojima wanted to work in the Famicom division, Konami put him in the less exciting MSX2 division. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The MSX2 was a more robust system than the Famicom, featuring more power, keyboard controls, and an established base of users who were accustomed to more complex and varied styles of games. Plus, he felt at home among his new peers: fellow rejects of various creative fields who were stuck in Konami’s inglorious b-team.

The moment Kojima became involved with the project he exploded with ideas. He covered his desk with notes and concepts until his coworkers became concerned. He went to sleep thinking about penguins and woke up having visions. He pushed himself to the brink of exhaustion every day trying to solve the game’s issues. Eventually he was relieved from the project, but not before getting a handful of ideas into the final game.

His first true planning role would be for a platforming game called Lost Warld, spelled that way to incorporate the word war into world. It was supposed to be his game design debut, but after six months of development it was canned by management. Kojima was devastated, and his team could hardly believe what had happened. Being pulled from one project to another without being given any real authority was a nightmare for a man who wanted to be a respected auteur like John Carpenter or Stanley Kubrick. Things were looking bleak.

He began to lie about his job when talking with strangers, claiming to work at an insurance company instead. Meanwhile at Konami, he looked for a chance to take over a project he could truly claim as his own. When he was asked to help on a military action game facing technical problems, he found that chance.

5 Nearly all of the background information in this section comes from Metal Gear Solid Naked, 2004. A Portrait of Hideo Kojima.

6 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2012/may/23/hideo-kojima-interview-part-1

7 EDGE Magazine, April 2004. Reproduced at http://www.metalgearsolid.net/features/hideo-kojima-versus-the-big-robots.

8 The most prominent example is when Atari paid over $20 million (a lot of money by 1982 standards) for the rights to the E.T. video game, which became a massive failure and embarrassed the industry due to the contrast in quality with the smash-hit film. Magnavox and Imagic were among the many companies who abandoned video games during the troublesome period, seeing that the prospects were grim. The economic chilling effect of seeing developers going out of business and stores marking down prices en masse led to investors reversing course.

Chapter 2

METAL GEAR (1987)

STEALTH ACTION

Launching what would eventually become a billion dollar franchise,⁹ the original Metal Gear for the MSX2 Computer is nevertheless a confusing relic from a bygone era. Hard to find, hard to play, and harder still to keep straight across its various incarnations over the decades, it introduced many in the gaming world to the idea of a stealth action genre, serious plot twists, and the surprising utility of a cardboard box in top-secret missions. To a young Hideo Kojima, making his first video game was an introduction to the struggle for creative control in a fast-moving industry.

His original assignment had been to take over the design of a generic military game because of some difficulty they were having with the MSX2’s hardware limitations. It was supposed to be a mindless action-packed shooting game like so many others, but the system could hardly handle more than a few sprites moving at the same time. Kojima’s solution was audacious, but it made sense: flip that formula on its head by making the hero weak and vulnerable, and make the objective to avoid combat altogether. To sell this idea he compared it to the classic World War II film The Great Escape, in which a band of soldiers must escape a Nazi prison camp equipped with nothing but their wits. The game was therefore going to be about escaping prison while avoiding detection. Unfortunately, to a Konami executive in the 1980s, that sounded like the kind of fantasy no child wanted to have, and so they forced Kojima to make changes. In 2012 he described the experience to publication The Guardian like this:

... I had such a hard time convincing people. I had so many things going against me at that time. For one, my first game had been canceled, so I hadn’t released anything yet. Then I was working in quite a large creative group, and I was the youngest. Finally, the type of game I wanted to make didn’t exist at that time. The odds were stacked against me and it was very hard to earn the trust of the team.¹⁰

Kojima recalled how he pleaded with a senior member of the team to aid him:

"He listened to my frustrations, and then approached one of the higher-ups in the company who must have seen something in me as he invited me to pitch my ideas for Metal Gear in front of everyone. Everyone in the team saw that it was a revolutionary idea, I think, and from then on, I had their support."

The idea was changed from escaping a compound to breaking into one. Instead of being a POW, the player would control an elite soldier who just happened to be unarmed. Inspired by his days of playing hide-and-seek as a child, he wanted the gameplay to feature sudden role-reversals, where the player could instantly go from the hunter to the hunted. There was no question that it would be a good game…if he could pull it off.

Development hell would push Kojima to his limit. He considered quitting several times out of frustration, but decided to press on out of spite. He had too much to prove, had heard too many doubters, and had spent too many years dreaming of his opportunity to be a creator to let hardship stop him when he was now so close. The biggest problem he faced was a lack of control. Every little decision became a struggle with programmers who had their own ideas of how things should work; he would tell them what he wanted and they would give him something else. We might assume he got his way on the cover art, at least, since it’s pretty much copied directly from a scene in Terminator (1984), one of his favorite cult sci-fi films. His inexperience, youth, and fresh failure landed him in the furnace of scrutiny. Only his stubbornness would pull him through it.

PLOT AND EVENTS

Metal Gear’s story was ahead of its time. It’s simplistic by today’s standards, but it’s important to keep track of where video game storytelling was back then. Incorporating a strange cast of characters with their own motivations, surprising twists to keep players guessing, and some of the most novel ideas for gameplay in the late 1980s industry, Kojima hoped to make something that stood apart from the average military game, and he achieved exactly that. Looking back at his 1987 debut, his premise of sneaking into enemy territory to destroy a big robot was surprisingly robust.

The game is set in a futuristic military compound in Africa that goes by the moniker Outer Heaven. We follow a rookie soldier code named Solid Snake¹¹, who belongs to a covert unit of the U.S. Army Special Forces known as FOXHOUND. FOXHOUND’s top-ranked soldier, code named Grey Fox,¹² was captured while investigating Outer Heaven’s nuclear capabilities, and it’s Snake’s job to save him and find out what’s going on. Thus begins Operation Intrude N313.

Snake approaches the compound by water, swimming to its docks and climbing into a warehouse patrolled by soldiers. Armed with nothing except a pack of Lucky Striker cigarettes (an obvious play on the Lucky Strike brand of actual cigarettes), he avoids the guards and begins to steal supplies that he can use against the enemy. Guided by FOXHOUND’s legendary commander, code named Big Boss, Snake manages to contact members of a resistance group imprisoned throughout the complex, gathering valuable hints about where to go next and how to defeat tough enemies. Eventually he finds his teammate Grey Fox, who tells him about the man responsible for designing the bipedal battle tank to which the franchise owes its name: a scientist named Dr. Petrovich.¹³ As the head of the Metal Gear project, he alone knows how to destroy it, and Snake must seek him out to obtain this information and take the nuclear-equipped weapon out of commission. The scientist is trapped deeper within the fortress, and to reach him Snake must first defeat Outer Heaven’s elite team of combat specialists who are waiting for him at key points throughout the compound. Dialogue and exposition are both limited, but the anti-nuke crux of the plot is clear even in this basic format.

Using the impressive arsenal of weapons and equipment he’s collected along the way, Snake kills each one of the elite specialists that tries to stop him. When he reaches the holding cell of Dr. Petrovich, he discovers that he’s too late. Petrovich has already been moved to another building ten kilometers north of where Snake is!

To get to Building 2, Snake must navigate a landmine-laden desert using a mine detector, destroy an army tank using his own collection of landmines, and disguise himself as an enemy officer to bypass an enemy checkpoint. Inside, he finds heavy enemy presence and a labyrinth of poison-choked corridors, but still manages to reach what appears to be Dr. Petrovich, tied up in the basement. In truth, however, this is an actor impersonating the designer of the dangerous Metal Gear weapon! A trap panel in the floor opens up when Snake tries to free him, nearly taking Snake with him. Once again Snake must piece together clues to reach the invaluable scientist, this time enlisting the help of a resistance member named Jennifer.

Nothing is ever as easy as Snake would like, however. Jennifer is willing to arrange for help, but only if Snake has saved enough POWs to earn her respect. This is an actual gameplay mechanic, in which players earn stars for saving POWs, and having more stars rewards Snake with a longer health bar and the ability to carry more ammunition for his weapons, as well as a bigger supply of rations for recovering health. Meanwhile, the elusive Dr. Petrovich has a surprise requirement of his own before he’s willing to divulge his secrets: Snake must first find and rescue his daughter Ellen, who is in captivity elsewhere on the base. Back to work Snake goes.

Once Ellen is saved, Petrovich will explain the bizarre secret to destroying Metal Gear. The key, it turns out, is to detonate plastic explosives on the feet of the giant robot in a specific order. No, it doesn’t make sense, but this was as much as the MSX2 could handle. He shares the correct order with Snake (or most of it, anyway, as Snake must guess which foot gets the last C4 charge), and then gives him directions to reach the final building of the complex where Metal Gear is housed.

Closing In

Snake must cross yet another desert to get there, and this time it’s filled with venomous scorpions. On top of that, the desert can only be crossed using a compass, which Snake needs to have scavenged along the way. When he finally reaches Building 3, he’s in for a whole series of unpleasant surprises. Rows of trucks carrying an endless stream of soldiers are lined up next to the entrance of the building, and as they rush out to kill the green-garbed menace who has been killing their comrades, a sudden radio call from Big Boss instructs Snake to sneak into the truck on the far right.

Taking the truck, it turns out, has an unexpected result: Snake is transported all the way back to the first building he entered, near the beginning of his mission! If Snake disobeys Big Boss’s orders and enters Building 3 instead when he finally makes his way back, the strike team rushes inside to kill him. Murdering them all earns Snake another call from his commander, who this time directs him to enter a room to the left. What’s in the room? A death trap, as the floor opens up to swallow Snake alive! Something is deeply wrong.

Nevertheless, quitting is not an option for Snake. He finds a way forward by swimming through the base’s water system and bypassing a series of trap-filled rooms, then gets a call from Kyle Schneider, the resistance leader. Schneider has discovered the secret identity of Outer Heaven’s leader, and is about to share it when he is suddenly attacked and his transmission cuts off.

The next obstacle is a madman calling himself Coward Duck,¹⁴ who surrounds himself with innocent captives as he throws deadly boomerangs at Snake from across the room. Despite all of his advanced weaponry, Snake has few options for killing the captor, because any stray damage will harm the prisoners, among whom is Jennifer’s brother! Here Kojima uses character relationships—however loosely established—to turn a standard video game boss fight into something more meaningful. The hostages are not magically invulnerable and must not be harmed, further differentiating the nature of Snake’s mission from other action games of the era. Moving in close is also not an option, because the middle of the floor hides a death trap. Killing Coward Duck without harming the hostages earns Snake Jennifer’s utmost respect, as well as the high-clearance security card needed to reach Metal Gear. Untying Jennifer’s brother earns Snake a strange sounding tip about climbing a certain ladder when trying to escape. Everybody has secrets they’re willing to share if you impress them, it seems.

Metal Gear itself is not far now. Along the way, Snake finds Schneider tied up in a