The Metal Gear franchise has had many titles for nearly three decades, but its creator didn’t have such plans…

Hideo Kojima worked at Konami until 2015, but his conflict with the Japanese publisher was already present in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. While the first half of the game is excellent, the second half quickly becomes repetitive, and it was effectively unfinished (there were plans for further missions and the like) as Kojima left the company.

Rika Muranaka, Metal Gear Solid’s music producer, told Game Developer that Kojima didn’t want to create a long-running series: “Hideo didn’t want to do a series or franchise like Final Fantasy, so he kept fighting with Konami because Konami was like ‘It’s a hit.’ That’s what the business people say. Hideo being an artist, wanted to make a different video game. But it became so successful that everybody wanted a sequel. That’s a kind of difficult position to be in. It becomes someone else’s game.”

Muranaka also revealed that Kojima wanted Hans Zimmer to work on the Metal Gear Solid soundtrack. It didn’t happen because his price range was beyond the Japanese team’s budget: “Because we were so successful with Metal Gear Solid, Hideo said ‘Okay, we have a budget, maybe we can hire a Hollywood composer.’ We went to Media Ventures (now known as Remote Control Productions), Hans Zimmer’s studio. We originally wanted to get Hans Zimmer, but he was like ‘No, I can’t do it for that kind of money’ – he’s so expensive, it’s ridiculous.”

It led to Kojima working with Harry Gregson-Williams, who worked with Zimmer at the time. He added that he wasn’t considering working on video game music. Still, he got up to gear in the genre, as he worked with Kojima until 2014 (from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, that’s nearly fifteen years), followed by composing for Call of Duty games.

Source: PSL