It’s no coincidence that Hideo Kojima has decided to make what is essentially a new Metal Gear, different from Konami’s IP only in name…

Kojima, the founder and CEO of Kojima Productions, has released a special HideoTube video on YouTube. It’s about the recently announced action spy game Physint, which the Japanese genius is developing for Sony Interactive Entertainment. During the broadcast, he explained why he ultimately decided to make a non-Metal Gear (since Konami retained the IP rights, they were unable to continue it!)

“We are going to make a new action spy game in collaboration with Sony. It will be a game and a movie at the same time. That’s why we went to Sony Pictures. Of course it will be a game. But if your mother comes in and sees you playing this game, she’ll think you’re watching a movie. I don’t know how far we can take it yet. So why did I decide to do this? Well, first of all, because I became independent, I wanted to do something new with my own IP. So to challenge myself, I made Death Stranding first. Then to create a franchise, I made Death Stranding 2. And I wanted to do something even newer, so I started working on OD. And since then, there have been a lot of new ideas. But for the last eight years, every day on social media, from users all over the world, people were asking me to make another Metal Gear and stuff like that.

Then I got sick in 2020. It was also during the pandemic, so I was sick and isolated for the whole time. I even had surgery. And I thought, “I can’t do this anymore. I was at my lowest point and felt like I couldn’t go back to making games. I also wrote a will. And in that moment I realized that people die. But I turned 60 last year. I’ll be 70 in ten years. I hope to never retire. However, if the users want it so much, I thought I should change my priorities a bit. I still want to do new things, but I decided to make an action spy game.

I get a lot of requests from Hollywood to make movies, but I’ve turned them down. Now that I have my own company, I can’t go away for a year or two to make a movie. The company would collapse. I was in a difficult situation. And I talked to Guillermo del Toro about it. And he said, “Hideo, what you’re doing is already a movie. Keep going the way you are. His words saved me. And since we’re going to be working with a lot of creators in the industry, even though it’s a game, it won’t be too different from movies,” Kojima said, adding he’ll begin Physint’s development after Death Stranding 2: On The Beach.

Honest words from him, and let’s hope we don’t hear any news about his sudden death…

Source: Gematsu