Hideo Kojima confesses that Metal Gear Solid 2’s motion capture was done using “trial and error” 25 years ago

Hideo Kojima admits the team relied on “trial and error” while experimenting with Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty’s motion captured animations. 

While Metal Gear Solid 2 came out in 2001, Hideo Kojima and the development team at Konami were hammering away at the sequel years before Hollywood even bought its first motion-captured characters to life on the big screen. Remembering the game’s production on its 23rd anniversary month, Kojima shared some insight over on social media.

“We experimented with magnetic motion capture in ‘Metal Gear Solid: Integral’, and in MGS2, we adopted optical motion capture for the first time,” the famed director recently tweeted. “Was the shooting done about 25 years ago? Well, back then, everything was trial and error, but every day felt fresh and exciting.”

Magnetic motion capture had actors wear metallic body suits while their movements were recorded via magnetic sensors. It’s a method that’s still sometimes in use – and is relatively cheaper than other mocap routes – but Konami seems to have upped the ambition for its sequel. With optical motion capture, a bunch of different cameras would likely record the subject from all angles and that footage would then be used to recreate the movements in-game. 

Kojima has been opening up about the series’ past more than usual recently, especially as PlayStation’s 30th anniversary looms. He just told the story about how he moved to Tokyo alone with nothing but a console and a TV to make the very first Metal Gear, for example.

Reminisce with our list of every Metal Gear game, ranked.