Examiner was invited to a group Q&A session with game industry icon Hideo Kojima and Platinum Games’ Atsushi Inaba about Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance in Los Angeles the Monday after Rising was revealed – essentially for the second time - at the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards. The presentation included a documentary about the development of Rising and the subsequent move from Kojima Productions to Platinum Games. The talk focused mostly on high-level development issues, so there were no questions about Rising’s story or gameplay elements other than what we have already seen. Check out video from the Q&A session here (which has an unfortunate cut at around the 34-minute mark and at the end because our camera was dropped twice).
There is a part in the documentary about the development of Metal Gear Solid Rising that I thought was very telling about Hideo Kojima. As I was listening to him talk about Rising and the road it took from cancellation (more on that later) to resurrection, at one point he considered bringing the game to Western developers to take a shot at it. I could only imagine the elation a Western developer would have had if they got a phone call from Hideo Kojima about finishing Rising. I asked him if he had any particular developers in mind when he was going through that process, and while he obviously was not going to give specifics, he was very proud that he kept the development of Rising in Japan and with Platinum Games. As he was giving that answer, I couldn’t help but think about the lyrics to the song “Made in America” by Jay-Z and Kanye West.
“N****s hustle every day for a beat from Ye
What I do? Turn around gave them beats to Jay
And I’m rapping on the beat they was supposed to buy
I guess I’m getting high on my own supply.”
That might as well have been the background music of the 24-minute doc, irony of the song title notwithstanding. For somebody who strives for nothing but the best, Kojima expects nothing but the same from the people at Kojima Productions. The documentary shows how much of a shadow he casts over his entire studio. Even though he originally did not have a large role in Rising’s development (he was a producer but his focus was on finishing Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker), he saw that it was not living up to his standards. When the game – it was then known as Metal Gear Solid: Rising - was first shown in a trailer during E3 last year, the big hook of Rising was the ability to literally cut everything in the game. This was not just going to be limited to spots that were designated as cutting areas; nope, it was everything from the enemies to the watermelons and the actual buildings themselves.
Several parts of Rising’s development seemed to be going along fine. The story, which would be set in between Metal Gear Solid 2 and 4, was progressing to the point where cut scenes were already in place. The problem was the gameplay and its concept was presenting a great challenge. In a game where you can cut literally everything, the Rising team was having a hard time creating a game that would not just fall apart under the weight of its own signature feature. When the Rising team presented the game to Kojima in 2010, he said that it was not fun. If Raiden, Rising’s badass protagonist, is able to cut a building with ease, a player could conceivably just break the game, destroy scripted moments and ruin cut scenes. And those were just the things I was thinking about while watching the documentary. I could only imagine what details the team and Kojima was fretting about as they were making decisions about the game, which eventually lost direction.
So Rising was for a while there, dead in the water, cancelled around the tail end of 2010. In a somewhat parallel situation to what Shigeru Miyamoto is going through right now in Nintendo, the whole reason why Kojima was hands-off with Rising was because he wants the younger generation of programmers and designers and artists at Kojima Productions to be able to think on its own without having to rely on their boss to save the day if things go wrong. He relays a story about Zone of the Enders and how he originally had his staff work on the game but they were unable to complete it. And while he did consider Western developers to finish Rising, Kojima seemed determined to keep the game true to its Japanese roots. Kojima refers to Rising as a “feel-good” Metal Gear game that consists of “Hi-Speed Action” and jokingly, he said that his fear was that if the game were given to Western developers, Raiden’s katana would be replaced with guns and chainsaws.
His faith in Platinum and Inaba is evident during the Q&A. Kojima was enamored with the games that Platinum has developed, from Bayonetta to Okami (which was developed by a huge part of Platinum's team when they were still called Clover), and it was through happenstance that the studio even got the job. It was through conversations at industry parties that Kojima and Inaba and Hideki Kiyama got together and talked about Platinum taking over development of Rising.
The one thing that Inaba was very adamant about was that this is not Platinum trying to show up Kojima Productions. Revengeance is a title that has many meanings not only to the game but to Kojima himself. Revenge is now the central storyline point for Raiden and the game is now set years after Metal Gear Solid 4 and vengeance (and hi-speed action) is what Inaba and Platinum are bringing to the table. Revengeance is very much a Kojima Productions joint, and Platinum is there to add some shine to it, according to Inaba. But for Kojima, Revengeance also means something beyond just being a game it seems.
In the documentary, there is a moment where Kojima and Tatsuya Minami, the President and CEO of Platinum, are thanking people for being supportive of Japan during the earthquakes that devastated the country earlier this year. He also wanted to relay the message that this game will be something that will put Japanese games back in the forefront of the industry. Minami talks about a time when games that said “Made in Japan” used to mean quality and he wants to get back to that point again. I guess that’s why they’re keeping all of the good beats to themselves; they must feel like keepers of the throne of Japanese game development. At the end of the day, who better to watch it, right?
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