Hideo Kojima says Metallic Gear Strong 2 needed to make 300 adjustments & was virtually cancelled within the wake of the September 11 terrorist assaults

Hideo Kojima not too long ago gave an interview to the journal Weekly Tokyo Keizai, through which he talked somewhat concerning the run-up to the discharge of Metallic Gear Strong 2 and the way real-world occasions virtually scuppered the game’s launch. On the time MGS2 was in all probability essentially the most anticipated game on the planet, and was as a result of launch in November 2001. Then two months earlier than the game’s launch, the September 11 terrorist assaults occurred, killing just below 3,000 individuals and altering the course of the world.

MGS2, which featured terrorist factions attacking New York, was abruptly a undertaking with very unhealthy timing certainly. Kojima and Konami went into disaster mode, with Sony additionally concerned, realising that it merely couldn’t launch the game as-was on this context. Explicit scenes, comparable to Arsenal Gear crashing into Manhattan and collapsing varied buildings, have been now unthinkable (the bookends of this scene survive, however what occurs in-between is left to the participant’s creativeness). 

“The depiction of [the] game’s themes and its quite a few similarities with the real-world occasions on September 11 rendered it unfit for launch on the time,” mentioned Kojima (thanks, GR+). “After consulting with attorneys, the tip end result was that the game required revisions in 300 spots. It goes with out saying that we have been in disaster mode and it was threatening the discharge and sale of the game.”

Kojima had to enter a gathering with Konami’s senior administration and clarify the contents of MGS2’s story and situation: “Everybody’s facial features had a glance of ‘this isn’t good’.”

The director’s first intuition was that “the game should not be launched at this era in time” and, additional to that, “I’ve no different selection however to take accountability and resign from the corporate.”

Into this got here Sony Pc Leisure president Ken Kutaragi, who identified to Kojima that he was hardly accountable for actual world occasions and mustn’t hold himself accountable: “this isn’t a matter you ought to be ashamed of,” mentioned Kutaragi. “You need to go forward and launch the game.”

“[I also] reached out to Kagemasa Kozuki, the founding father of Konami by e-mail,” mentioned Kojima. “He responded with, ‘I’ve made up my thoughts. The game needs to be launched. What are your ideas?’ I used to be moved by the phrases and I too made up my thoughts.”

The game’s launch was in the end delayed by a couple of weeks whereas the builders labored to vary what wanted altering, and in the end launched on November 13, 2001. 

Kojima has not too long ago been reminiscing concerning the Metallic Gear video games, earlier than this lamenting that MGS4’s digital battlefield “is now not science fiction“. There was additionally the oddity of the parallels between Loss of life Stranding and the next world pandemic which, Kojima says, meant he re-wrote the upcoming sequel totally.