It's fair to say that Hideo Kojima's breakup with Konami wasn't a smooth one, with the legendary developer barred from accepting an award for Metal Gear Solid V and his departure being covered up as "just a holiday".
Prior to all of that drama, however, Kojima created some of Konami's most memorable games – but it seems that his initial career with the firm was so bumpy it almost ended before it began.
A 1999 interview with the developer has been translated by Shmupulations (thanks, Games Radar) which sees Kojima talking candidly about the problems he faced as a fledging developer at the company.
When he joined Konami in 1986, the firm was already deep in development on a war game which was proving problematic. The project, which would eventually become Metal Gear, would be assigned to Kojima.
"I can’t talk about this without crying," Kojima told Nice Games back in 1999. "Konami said they wanted a game made around the theme of 'war'. But the development had a troubled history. Several of Konami’s veteran developers, who had released many hit games before I joined the company, had been working on this war game for 2 years now. But it wasn’t going anywhere: they’d create something, then scrap it, create something, and scrap it again. There was a sort of legend at Konami, that if you got involved in this project, you’d up demoted or transferred. (laughs) I have no idea why they kept continuing it, but I think as a company, Konami just really wanted to have a war game."
A fan of movies and grand storytelling, Kojima saw this project as the perfect way to make his name in the business:
That was how the project came to me. What I was fixated on making, in the scope of a 'war' game, was an escape game. You know that old movie, The Great Escape? I thought it would be awesome to make a game built around a concept like that, of trying to escape from somewhere. But when I told the senior devs on the team about my idea, they were very dismissive: 'There’s 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 just zero motivation from the start. It was like, what do I have to do here, do I have to start beating people up?
It got so bad that Kojima almost quit Konami. "The situation only degraded further into passive-aggressive resistance," he said back in '99. "It got to the point where I was so fed up with working at a corporation like this that I was ready to quit Konami altogether. But then I talked with another older employee, and from that conversation, a pathway opened up."
Metal Gear launched on the MSX2 home computer in 1987 and on the NES in 1988. It established a series which continues to this day, and is one of Konami's most popular properties. Kojima left Konami in 2015 and established Kojima Productions as an independent studio. Its first game, Death Stranding, arrived in 2019.