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Kojima Productions: ‘There will be a big revelation at E3’

The Kojima Productions Report, the studio’s official podcast, is finally back. It has been rebooted with a new format, and from now on will be called KP Alert, of which the first episode was released today.

The podcast is being hosted by Sean Eyestone and Ken Mendoza. They explained that there is no regular schedule for new episodes, but when they have news they will have an ‘Alert’.

KP-Alert

Kojima Productions will have a ‘big revelation’ for their pre-E3 show (which takes place on June 6h). ‘We have something very interesting in this show, so be looking forward to it.’ Sean Eyestone said. ‘There will be a big revelation there. Actually, a couple of very interesting revelations. So be looking forward to that’. ‘There are very interesting things to come.’ Kendoza added. They also stressed the importance of this event, explained that it’s a very big production, and there will be a lot of people involved.

The next section of the podcast consisted of interviews with different Kojima Productions staff members.

The first topic that was discussed was the Moby Dick Studio PR-stunt, for which they interviewed composer Ludvig Forssell.

Being Swedish, he helped create the Moby Dick Studio / Joakim Mogren thing, such as setting up the website. ‘Joakim’ being an anagram for ‘Kojima’ was a coincidence, or maybe a subconscious decision.

Joakim-Mogren

Why did they do all this? The idea was to create intrigue, to have people talk about it. Kojima also wanted to evaluate the Fox Engine, by seeing how people reacted to it without knowing it was Metal Gear. But people figured it out quickly. Kojima Prpductions received about a thousand mails during the first week, and all in all about 2000 mails. Furthermore, they saw about 400.000 unique views on the website in the first couple of days.

However, the Twitter (and other social media) accounts had nothing to do with Kojima Productions itself, but they liked what they were doing.

In retrospect, the staff feels that it was a fun experiment for everyone, and there was a lot of participation from the fans in the form of theories, articles, videos and things like that.

The actor for Mogren in the interview was a model who claimed to be Swedish, but according to Scandinavians on message boards, he sounded more like he was Norwegian.

Finally, the podcast hosts mentioned that there is a meaning to the name ‘Moby Dick’ Studio in relation to the game, and there ‘is more to come’, so ‘stay tuned’.

Moby-Dick-Studio

The next topic discussed was the Game Developers Conference that took place last March, during which Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was unveiled, the trailer was shown and several Kojima Productions staff members held a presentation on the Fox Engine. One of them was game designer Joshua McQuery, who was interviewed for this part of the podcast.

He explained that the content of the presentation was focused on the graphical capabilities of the Fox Engine. A lot of things in this project are based on the real world: a lot of characters and objects are captured (3D scans) from real objects and persons. Many of the main characters have been captured, including facial capture, which resulted in a realistic performance. Objects such as rocks are also captured from real objects, which is kind of rare in the game industry.

Fox-Engine-Screen-GDC-2013-2

McQuery also added that working on the trailer does take a lot of time, they spent a couple of weeks on it. But seeing the audience enjoy it makes the work worth it. The fans’ motivation makes them want to work harder on the project.

The comment corner is now called the CODEC section, and here the staff will still answer questions from listeners. However, there were no questions this time because this is the first episode, but people can send them in now.

Source: KP Alert 001 (May 31 2013)

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