Kojima talks about 20 years with PlayStation: ‘I feel I can relate to Sony’
In an interview in Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu, Hideo Kojima talked about his relationship with Sony over the past 20 years. Translation by Kotaku UK.
In the early 90s, 3D games using polygons where only found in the arcades, and Kojima thought it would be very difficult for a home console to be capable of this. But when he saw the specs of the PlayStation, he was ‘shaking’. He thought: “If I make a Metal Gear game on this console, it’ll be amazing.” So he asked Yoji Shinkawa to design a prototype for the Metal Gear REX, among other things.
One change Sony brought according to Kojima is how game developers where perceived. “I believe that the game business changed greatly because SCE treated those of us who made games as ‘creators’. We would have our pictures in articles as though we were artists, and there were parties for us. […] It really felt like the game business had moved up in the world.”
Kojima also told about how he was introduced to the PlayStation 2. Ken Kutaragi, the former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, gave him a development board, saying: “Mr. Kojima, please take this with you.” Kojima took the board back to his office and had a programmer work on it for almost three days in secret, as this was one of the few development boards in existence, and any information on it had to be kept under wraps.
Despite going multiplatform for the latest installment in the series, his history with the PlayStation brand is still there. “I feel I can relate to Sony, a company that was built up by engineers,” Kojima said. “And I hope that I can continue walking with them in the future.”
