Hideo Kojima is infamously known for his lengthy cutscenes these days, but once upon a time he was a lot more cautious of them.
There are a lot of players that don’t really like long cutscenes. After all, the point of a game is to play it, right? Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima hasn’t cared about that for quite a while though, with the fourth game in the espionage series holding the record for the longest continuous cutscene in any game ever at a whopping 71 minutes to this day. Except, funnily enough, Kojima didn’t always seem too keen on including such long cutscenes. As unearthed by Shmupulations (thanks, GamesRadar), in a 1997 interview with Famitsu, the iconic game developer spoke about all things Metal Gear Solid prior to its release on the original PlayStation.
Interestingly, the topic of cutscenes came up, where Kojima had this to say: “The one thing I want to avoid, though, are those tedious scenes where characters are just blabbering at each other for 4 or 5 minutes.” Only four or five minutes! Kojima, buddy, if only you knew what your future had in store for you (let’s not forget that 71 minutes might be the longest cutscene Kojima has under his belt, but a number of his other games have lengthy cutscenes too).
He even sounded a bit hesitant to add cutscenes at all, despite his known love for cinema, saying that he was “worried about the cinematic presentation. In order to make the direction effective, I feel like I may have to add unskippable cutscenes. The story for Metal Gear is very complicated, so I think cutscenes will be necessary.”
These days we can obviously see Kojima thinks differently about cutscenes, and with Death Stranding 2 on the way sometime next year (with a weird photomode to boot), time will only tell if he beats his record. Fingers crossed he does, if only because it would be funny.
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