Hideo Kojima tells about his complicated start at Konami!

We know that Hideo Kojima, creator of Metal Gear and Death Stranding left Konami some time ago. We know there were some issues about ideas and how that moved forward, however, this time I want to talk about the director's beginning within the company and how he adapted. This account comes from an interview from 1999 published by Nice Games, which resurfaced in recent weeks.

In the interview, Kojima talks about the challenges he faced when joining the company and about the project that was in progress when he arrived!

When Kojima joined, Konami had been working on a war game for two years that was going nowhere.

"That's how the project came to me," he explains. "What I was fixated on doing, within the scope of a 'war' game, was an escape game. You know that old movie, The Great Escape? I thought it would be amazing to make a game built around a concept like that, of trying to escape from somewhere. But when I told the senior developers on the team about my idea, they were very dismissive: 'There are no games like that.' I was still a new planner at Konami, so I guess no one was inclined to listen to what I had to say... there was no motivation from the start. It was like, what do I have to do here, do I have to start hitting people?"

Luckily, Kojima didn't have to hit anyone, as over time, other employees began to recognize his ideas, with the situation evolving into something "passive/aggressive".

Kojima says the team wasn't fully convinced of his idea until they saw the iconic exclamation point appear above an enemy's head when they were caught off guard in a functional version of the game. "That sold them on the concept."

As we already know, the director is very fond of cinema, always using some of his favorite movies to inspire some of his projects. Along with this love for cinema, he was asked why he didn't go into the film industry and Kojima replied saying that the Japanese film industry is not very open to new ideas.

"The film industry in Japan is very closed, and no one will give you money to fund a film," he says. "Even if you are hired by a studio like Toho, you will not be allowed to direct anything for a while. I think that's expected, but I'm not the kind of person who can be satisfied in a servile role like that."

After a period of writing fiction, he thought he would have to get a "normal job", something every writer can identify with, but then he started playing Famicom and realized that games were also powerful vehicles for storytelling.

"As I familiarized myself with different games, I became more interested," he recalls. "It was like, 'ah ha, there's a whole world here to explore as well.' What made me decide to enter this industry was Super Mario Bros. and The Portopia Serial Murder Case. They weren't the old 'bleep bloop' games; these games had their own worlds and stories. I felt a certain authorial quality in them."

Kojima says that at the time he lived in Hyōgo Prefecture, bordering Osaka, where Konami began as a jukebox rental and repair company, so the company was a good option for him. The rest is history, and now he manages to create some of the most cinematic games out there and regularly meets with the brightest and most promising movie stars of the moment.