Hideo Kojima has opened up about what it was like being an early progenitor of story-focused video games, revealing he once read around 300 books researching story details for a single game.
In a recent episode of TBS Radio’s After 6 Junction 2 podcast (timestamped here), Kojima relayed his experience as a young developer, in which he faced opposition against his desire to spend time developing stories in video games.
“They were 2D with big pixels, and you could only move from side to side,” Kojima said of video games at the time. “But I saw [their] potential. I pushed back against everyone’s opposition … There was no artistry. There was also no real story. So we wanted to be the ones to give it a story.”
Kojima wasn’t the first game developer to add stories to games, but he is definitely an early pioneer of exploring real-world themes and issues in games. Regardless, it sounds like a lot of his early days at Konami were spent making the case for the sort of narrative-heavy games he’s now known for.
“We were trying because it didn’t exist back then, but it was hard to make it a reality, because everyone was against it. They told me, ‘Games don’t need stories, Kojima.'”
Thankfully, Kojima persisted, saying he would often visit the library during work hours “to research things like plot settings,” again facing resistance from co-workers who felt stories weren’t important in games.
While Kojima would go on to create the beloved Metal Gear series at Konami, he first had some convincing to do. Not only was he up against resistance to the idea of story-focused games, he also had to convince the higher-ups of his vision for Metal Gear’s gameplay. In fact, a recently resurfaced 1999 interview reveals it wasn’t until Kojima showed his bosses the famous exclamation point feature in Metal Gear that they were sold on the idea. Kojima even said he was ready to quit Konami altogether at one point due to what he called “passive aggressive resistance.”