What Happened To Kojima?

Jonathan Soltan explains the behind the scenes drama of making MGSVOnce in a while, a game like The Last Guardian or Duke Nukem Forever comes along where the story behind the game is almost more interesting than the game itself. I believe Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is one of those games. Since I've been waiting in vain by the postbox for the last two weeks for the game to arrive (cheers Amazon), I've had plenty of time to read over the strange happenings at Konami involving series creator Hideo Kojima and his studio Kojima Productions. It was a saga that spanned months and had many worried about the final quality of The Phantom Pain. We now know that the game turned out great but things seemed dicey there for a while. It all started back in March when Kojima's name started disappearing from Konami's website and Kojima Productions Los Angeles was renamed Konami Los Angeles Studio. There was also a rumour circulating that Kojima himself would be leaving Konami following the release of Phantom Pain. Considering that Kojima was the Vice President of the company many people, including myself, found this hard to believe but none could deny that it was a strange situation. It only got stranger as Konami then put out job listings for a new team to make new Metal Gear games. Kojima had been the driving force behind the series since he created it and had built up a trusted team since then. That Konami was looking to replace them didn't bode well for the series' future. In addition to all this, Konami removed Kojima's name from the Silent Hills website. Up until then Kojima had been working on a reboot of the series with Guillermo del Toro, which was subsequently cancelled a month after its demo. Confusingly, at the beginning of April, Konami put Kojima's name back on certain product listings for Metal Gear games but then later in July removed both Kojima's name and the Kojima Productions logo from the Phantom Pain box art. According to a composer who had worked with Kojima on Metal Gear, all of this transpired because of Kojima's attitude with money when developing his games; with the budget for Phantom Pain rumoured to be in excess of $80m. While Kojima's “money is no object” attitude may have been good for the gamers, it's obvious that it earned him no favour with the shareholders of Konami. Now that he's gone we'll just have to wait and see which major publisher hands him a blank cheque first. Although, personally, I'm devastated that without Kojima we'll probably never get a sequel to one of the most criminally underrated games of the last few years: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.