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Interview With Hideo Kojima, Designer of Metal Gear Solid 2
There's a great interview with Hideo Kojima, the designer of Metal Gear Solid, VP at Konami, and currently working on Metal Gear Solid 2. Very interesting guy - the Renaissnance man description sounds quite apt.
Green Monkey
I remember playing Doom when I was a high school student that finally begged my parents enough to get a PC as a replacement for our dead C64 more than six years ago. Somewhere around that time, you could play it over the network, too, and you could probably find some mods on your local BBS between sessions of TW:2002.
As far as I can tell, everything by id from Doom on has been the same FPS with more sophisticated engines (see: Quake) and/or packaging (see: Heretic). Starsiege: Tribes has had team gameplay for years, and Quake is just now getting there. What's the next big project? Wolfenstein 2. Gee, lots of creativity in that choice...
If you like FPS, that's fine. To me, it's old and tired. I like inventive/innovative games. Since Doom (well, it goes back farther), I can only think of a handful that have really interested me. Warcraft II was so awesome that I still refuse to play Starcraft, and hybrid games like the god/action ActRaiser (SNES) and the chase/cyoa/race game Driver: You Are the Wheelman (various) are excellent examples of how much fun a game can be without support for the latest 3D buzzwords and spending six months' salary on a rig that can handle them.
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E2 IN2 IE?
And with them, the programmers will become what I call "programming rock stars".
Where have you been? This concept is at least 18 years old, right down to the phrase "rock stars." This is what Electronic Arts was created to do. See how long it lasted?
Interestingly, of all the people you mentioned, only two are programmers (Sweeney and Carmack). Mr. Kojima is not a programmer. He is part designer, part manager (more the latter than the former). Games are created by large teams of 10 to 200 people, with a rough average of 25. Maybe 30% of those people are programmers. Can you name *anyone* doing programming for Metal Gear Solid 2? Or should the manager take all the credit?
Maybe "video game rock stars" would have been a more appropriate phrase. You're right Kojima didn't do the actual programming, but he did bring the whole thing together. Can anybody name who actually operated the cameras on Hitchcock's films? Actually, I'm sure someone can. But you get the point.
You don't understand video game development. There's much more in common with pumping out commodity items, like toys and WB sitcoms, than there is with creating art. Mr. Kojima is a _manager_. Most days he probably works on budgets, looks at sales projections, runs meetings, makes sure the project is sticking to milestones, etc. This is business, not idealistically created art.
Hmm, I've never thought of programming as a profession you get into for the women (or men in some cases).
Becoming programming celebrities is a pretty rare event in any case, and there are better roads to take if you want fame.
It would be like getting a government job (as a clerk or something) so you can become president and get all of the women (interns).
I read the internet for the articles.
Not quite. Besides the Metal Gear series, he made 2 other games. And I bet you that you can't name one of them.
He got lucky with Metal Gear Solid. If the second one is good, and if he actually makes other games I may give him credit. Right now he is just a producer that has one unbelievable game on his record.
If you are trying to compare Carmacks technical expertise to Hideo's, Hideo is going to get his ass whooped. ANYONE is going to get their ass whooped. Nobody codes better than Carmack. His game design is questionable, but nobody codes better than him. HE nearly made Quake 3, one of the most technically impressive games, still. How many other games have one programmer credits?
And you know what? I'm not even going to post anon.
So all game developers should just pander to the lowest common denominator?? There's plenty of mindless games out there if you want them. Maybe some people prefer games that are a bit more sophisticated.
In my opinion, what Kojima is actually doing is writing characters into the story that promote a particular value system. As he's a game designer, whether he agrees with these politics or not is not really central to the discussion. His technique (politics in the backstory) adds depth to the game, and as long as he does it in a tasteful and optional way like he did in the first Metal Gear Solid, I see nothing wrong with it. A crucial question to the Metal Gear story is the question of good and evil, and whether a trained killer like Solid Snake is any better than the terrorists he fights against. Kojima and the rest of the Metal Gear/Konami team did an excellent job of leaving the answer to that question as an exercise for the gamer; but the back-story about the nuclear/terrorist threat and the corruption of black-ops units gives the player something to think about beyond where his next ammo clip or ration is coming from.
At any rate, if what you're saying is that you don't agree with Kojima's politics, I guess I can respect that. But if what you're asking of Kojima is "less backstory, more game mechanics", then you're probably playing the wrong kind of game. There are plenty of games which center around killing without discussing the ethics of war and violence. For example, just about every FPS and fighter on the market. The Metal Gear franchise has always had an extensive story surrounding the gameplay, and the story has always been a crucial part of what made the game memorable. The anti-war slant is new with Metal Gear Solid (the earlier games were more about betrayal), but the dynamic is the same--as Solid Snake progresses with his espionage, a story about right and wrong unfolds around him.
Besides, if you want tactical espionage without a plot line, you can always play the Metal Gear VR Missions, which are considerably more challenging than the original Metal Gear Solid, and don't really go into a political back-story.
Just the inertia from its predecessor will make it sell well. That, added to the fact the game will be excellent shall probably make a winner out of MGS2.
I'm also a Looking Glass Studios fan, having been absolutely fascinated by System Shock I (which is IMHO, THE best game ever made).
I believe that Looking Glass' games were too modern for their time. That, coupled with very little marketing was the cause for bad sales.
The common guy usually prefers shooting at everything that moves to thinking. It's extremely fortunate that most people are getting tired of mindless shooting games, so the market for MGS grows.
Flavio
Deus Ex is another cool sneak around type game. Also has lots of role playing elements and a really great storyline.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Games Programmers, that's who. Just like we now talk of Bradd Pitt and Alfred Hitchcock in Hushed tones, soon we shall be talking of hotshot young games programmers in the same reverential way.
This has already been tried in the past, and it hasn't worked. Thing is, there can be 20 to 200 people working on one project. And the people who you usually hear about, like John Romero and Dave Perry, don't actually do programming. They're more managers than anything. John Carmack is one of the few exceptions to this rule.
The first pretentious art house video game? Moondust, for God's sake. On the Commodore 64.
Yawn. MGS is a dull game, on a dull platform. Consoles are suited for racing games and fighting games, period. The lack of any real way to save your game means that console games can't really differentiate characters and can't save any progress in a usefull way.
MGS was a neat concept, but was poorly executed compared to what could be done on a PC with a decent engine.
Calling the designer a genius is only slightly less ridiculous than calling the designer of Zelda 64 a genius. They're both stuck in a console world making cheap throw-away games.
Quick correction... Carmack didn't write the game logic for anything in the Quake series. He might have done part of it for Q1, but Q2 and Q3 other people were doing it.
Not to say he couldn't, the game logic is the easiest stuff in those games, but just to give credit where credit is due...
And you're right, Carmack didn't *invent* any of the 3D graphics tools, he "invented" ways to do them fast enough on machines of the day, to use them in realtime.
And sure, Michael Abrash helped with some of it, but it was Carmack who put in the very long days, trying all the different ways he could think of, actually testing various methods.
This was true in the early 80's, I dobut we will ever get back there anymore.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Soon, the two industries shall merge, and actors shall be simulated on computers. Who shall our heroes be then?
Games Programmers, that's who. Just like we now talk of Bradd Pitt and Alfred Hitchcock in Hushed tones, soon we shall be talking of hotshot young games programmers in the same reverential way.
What impact will this have on the industry as a whole? The best programmers will all be working in the frivolous games industry for the adulation and respect (not to mention women, of course), so won't Linux and the mainstream applications that are our flesh and blood suffer?
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
Another interview with Hideo Kojima can be found here..
You can see how he's been influenced by other programmers. It's the way he codes -- the projects he works on. He succeeds where Romero failed with Daikatana, though Hideo isn't quite where Steve Woston was in his prime. Still, if you had to bet on a battle between Hideo and Carmack, I'd put my money on Hideo. He just has a lot more talent.
Forklifts have universal appeal. Everyone, from old grandmothers to middle-aged businessman to your little brother can understand what to do with a forklift: race it through the streets of 1980s Yokohama!
Also, the idea of using smells in video games is simply preposterous. Research has shown that the most desired feature of the children of the 21st century is not smells, but taste. How could you not to want to join Ryo Hazuki in experiencing the cool, refreshing taste of Coca-Cola? Or of licking your new UFO catcher figures just to see if you can get high off the paint?
If Hideo Kojima has his way, we'll all be doomed to spend the rest of our gaming lives playing trite old spy sims and mecha fighters. These kind of games have been done over and over. But where, may I ask, are all the forklift racers? Or how about the cat-raising simulations? And what happened to the adjusting-a-sign-to-make-sure-it's-level games of the mid-90s? Only Shenmue can provide you with these experiences.
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.
It seems to me that more games are geared on secrecy and stealth nowadays. I love games in the style of System Shock, Half-Life and Metal Gear Solid, so I can only applaud this tendency.
With the Tomb Raider epoch fading to a less shooting, more thinking age, I can only feel that perhaps we are making progress in the "game ideology" scenery.
Actually, that sounded quite naive and it's more of what I hope will happen. Games like Starcraft and Command & Conquer are classified as strategy but actually have very little thinking connected to their gameplay.
Now Kojima tells us about anti-warfare messages, which is also very good. How could someone transmit an intelligent message while condoning pseudo-logical ideology driven irrational violence?
MGS2 seems to indicate the beginning of very sophisticated games based on thought and feeling, now that technology permits it.
Now if we only had William Gibson's neural interfaces and be able to smell in another world...
Flavio
This is a very similar model that Thief employed some 2 years ago. You could play it as a hack and slash type game, but if you upped the difficulty level to Hard or above you lost the game if you killed anybody. You had to sneak around and knock people out with a blackjack.
Thief didn't sell all that well, despite getting rave reviews and being a great game. The company that made it, Looking Glass Studios, went bankrupt just this year shortly after releasing a sequel.
So I wonder if this is a sellable idea. Thief didn't have nearly the eye candy that MGS2 has, so that might effect sales. Sounds like an interesting game.
Q.