In an interview at E3, Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima has admitted that MGS2 was meant to be his last game in the series, but problems with others portraying his ideas forced him back into the director’s chair.
Kojima said, “Metal Gear Solid 2 was meant to be my last Metal Gear before I handed it off to the team, and the team did actually start working on MGS3, but unfortunately there were problems and it didn’t go well, so I was forced to come back and work on it.”
He tried extra hard to make sure the same problem didn’t occur with the PS3 follow up. “When it came to MGS4, I said OK this time for sure I’m not getting involved so I really handed it off. Because I set two different directors working on it I was sure I wouldn’t have to get involved, but there was a difference in expectations of what I felt that Metal Gear should be.”
Kojima doesn’t seem to blame anyone, though. “It’s very hard to come up with the concept of a game and hand it off to other people, as of course they can’t see what’s in my head. They may not be able to understand the concept completely, or the messages that I want to convey and that’s where things went awry in the past as people couldn’t really understand what I wanted.” As a result, where his his ideas are involved, he’s going to stay in charge. “I decided at that point that if I was going to make a game based around these ideals that I would do it myself, which is why I keep getting involved.”
As well as Metal Gear Solid 5, he’s is currently working on new series which Kojima says is “something more on a human level“, the mysterious Project Ogre and the new Fox Engine. Regarding the last two he also had this to add, “One thing that I can say is that Project Ogre is evolving alongside the Fox Engine. The Fox Engine is at the point now where it is pretty much ready to start making a game, so rather than releasing a sample image of, say, our meeting room, what will be the next sample you see from Fox Engine will be something from Project Ogre.” Can’t wait.
