Hideo Kojima once envisioned a Metal Gear Solid 3 boss battle so complex and intricate that it would have taken two weeks IRL to complete.
The story is part of the latest episode of Did You Know Gaming, a follow-up to a video full of trivia about the Metal Gear Solid franchise. It is re-narrated by the original English voice of Solid Snake himself, David Hayter.
The story goes that during the production of Metal Gear Solid 3, Kojima had fallen in love with the works of novelist Stephen Hunter, whose books The Master Sniper and Point of Impact were about snipers embedded in mountains, who gradually they tried to choose each other. . Kojima’s idea was that Snake’s boss fight with The End would be as close to a real-life sniper fight as humanly possible, and would play out over two weeks in real time. The player would have to use their surroundings to stay hidden and silent, search for clues in a huge area to identify where The End was hiding, and once located, set up the perfect shot. Again, this would play out over two actual weeks.
The crazy thing is that this boss fight made it to a prototype stage. It was, at one point, an actual part of a playable build. However, when it came time to try the fight, no one who played could find a trace of the old man. Numerous players spent hours searching for The End and found nothing, hindering their progress in the game. The team found the fight so excruciatingly boring that they started booing Kojima, convincing him to give up on the idea entirely.
Kojima is known for coming up with bold and sometimes unattainable ideas, but Metal Gear Solid 3’s two-week sniper fight proves that some things really are fresher in the mind than in practice.
There are many more awesome and verified Kojima moments from this episode. Here are just a few tidbits:
- The Metal Gear Solid VR Missions expansion grew out of boredom while putting together the European port of the game. With plenty of time on their hands throughout the day, the team started playing at their own game, and before they knew it, Kojima and crew had a bank of short-term challenges to pull from. . When he finally confessed that his team had been entertaining himself for months, his unimpressed superiors asked if it was possible to turn the missions into a proper game.
- Kojima released a competitive multiplayer mode, a sort of 1v1 hide-and-seek game similar to what Assassin’s Creed would do in the Ezio era. However, he had also told Konami that Metal Gear Solid would only take a year to make, and production was in its third year at the time, so it had to be scrapped.
- Kojima had originally wanted to create an enemy AI for Metal Gear Solid 2 that had an instant readout in the player. It would discover your actions during the first few minutes of gameplay and use that information to create a player profile, including age, gender, and personal interests. The information would be used for and against the player throughout their game. The PS2, of course, simply didn’t have the power to realize such a big idea. All that remains of this plan is a questionnaire that asked the player for their information. This information later appears on Raiden’s dog tags towards the end of the game, the same ones he throws away, symbolically leaving the player’s identity behind while claiming his own.
- Kojima really got into the sharks during production on Metal Gear Solid 2 and came up with various ideas about Snake having to evade or fend off the creatures. One sequence would have involved Snake swimming through a flooded section of the Big Shell complex and spilling his blood to distract the sharks. Another involved a boss fight with a great white. There are no sharks in the end game.
- For Metal Gear Solid 4, Kojima had wanted to create a “simulation world”, in which trees would grow to full height from saplings over time. Trees that were watered would grow. Trees that were not, would die. Kojima envisioned players growing an entire jungle that they could then use in a shootout. It turned out that the PlayStation 3’s famous bullish marketing had attracted him to its cellular processor and the kind of power that could be extracted from it. “We set our dreams too high because we thought he could do anything,” Kojima would later tell G4.
- It took Kojima a while to warm to the idea of Raiden as the protagonist of Metal Gear Rising Revengeance. He had originally wanted Gray Fox or Frank Jaeger, but pushing it would have meant getting more involved in the production, which he didn’t want to do. Ultimately, Kojima came to regard it as game development in the generation that came after him. “They wanted to make a really cool hack and slash title with some katana and Raiden action, and I thought, ‘OK, that’s fine, I respect that.'”
Anyway, the whole 40 minute video is great and you should watch it. Stay towards the end to see The Wild Geese, the movie that inspired Kojima to create the Metal Gear franchise.