It’s rare to see Hideo Kojima, creator of theMetal Gearfranchise and one of the video game industry’s greatest auteurs, express regret over his creative output. But as it turns out, he sometimes feels remorse about one ofMetal Gear Solid’s biggest and most central plot points - and now, he’ll never get the chance to resolve it. Kojima’s known for a lot of things, primarily creating the stealth genre with the firstMetal Gear, then inventing the first-ever Strand-type game,Death Stranding, and its upcoming direct sequel. He’s also known for his lengthy X (formerly Twitter) threads.
Usually, the subject of Kojima’s social media rants is a review of a movie he saw, or his lunch at Kojima Productions, or acelebrity he scanned intoDeath Stranding 2. Occasionally, though,he also posts musings into his own work and creative process. Although threads like these have grown increasingly rare over the years, they once offered some of the most fascinating insights into how his mind works. They weren’t all positive, either; from time to time, Kojima reevaluated his own creative decisions and found them lacking, including in one unearthed thread where he discussed Solid Snake himself.
Hideo Kojima “Regrets” Making Solid Snake A Clone
Snake from the Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater reveal trailer alongside Snake from the original Snake Eater game in a jungle environment
In a series of three tweets originally posted in 2014 (here reproduced byMetal Gear Informer),Kojima admitted that, if he could start the series over from the beginning,he wouldn’t write Solid Snake as a clone of Big Boss. He says:
In [the] case of MGS, I always make this would be the last so I don’t really think ahead. If I thought ahead, I wouldn’t have made the main character be clone, the ending to be hard to continue.
In other words,Kojima always writes each of his games as if they’re to be the last in the series; he never approaches them with expectations of a sequel. On the one hand, that’s a good thing: it ensures that most of his games are complete as they are, and don’t require sequels or DLC to tell the rest of their stories. On the other, when they do succeed and get tapped for sequels, it makes it that much harder to continue to escalate their stories.
To that end, Kojima says, if he’d known there was going to be aMetal Gear Solid 2(and3, and4, andV, andPortable Ops, andPeace Walker),he never would’ve made Snake a clone. He likely also wouldn’t have killed off Liquid Snake so early, since he proved to be a fan-favorite character later. He goes on to say that this kind of “postscripting” is especially difficult withMGS, because the series' tendency to jump forwards and backwards in time means he has to consider every decision’s impact on both past and future events.
Looking back on it today,it’s hard to imagine aMetal Gearwhere Snake isn’t a clone. It’s sort of become the crux of the whole series, with each successive entry leaning on a different part of the Boss' legacy and different groups' attempts to reinterpret it. But later in the series, Kojima started using an interesting storytelling strategy to walk back plot points he was uncertain about, and it would’ve been interesting to see how he might’ve applied it to Snake’s potential backstory - but he never got the chance.
Kojima Never Got The Full Metal Gear Retcon He Wanted
Metal Gear Ended Abruptly
Now, these Tweets were posted in 2014, just over a year beforeMetal Gear Solid Vwas released. Say what you will about its story as a whole, but in its final chapters, it does something fascinating:MGSVrecontextualizes every appearance of Big Boss that follows chronologically, revealing that the real Big Boss disappeared after Paz’s death, and that Venom Snake, as he comes to be known, is actually a bystander who was transformed into a body double via plastic surgery and hypnosis.
It’s an incredible last-minute reveal, and, while it’s not the most universally beloved ending, it does a fine job of driving the game’s themes home. It also shows an incredible willingness by Kojima to kill his darlings, as it were -to retcon plot points that don’t serve the greaterMetal Gearsagaby coming up with wild, left-field twists that completely change the rest of the series. I shudder to think what he might’ve done with other story elements, including Snake’s being a clone, had he been allowed to continue in that capacity, but, unfortunately, it never came to fruition.
This is becauseKojima departed Konami, seemingly on pretty bad terms, almost immediately after the release ofMetal Gear Solid V. Although the story has a happy ending, with Kojima establishing his own studio and making games entirely on his own terms, we probably missed out on a lot ofMetal Gearas a result - not to mentionSilent Hills, but that’s a story for another time. So Kojima never really got the opportunity to retcon Snake’s story the way he might’ve liked, and, withMetal Gearnow firmly in Konami’s hands, he likely never will.
Kojima May Try To Make Up For His Metal Gear Regrets In Other Ways
How DS2 & Physint Could Compensate
But although Hideo Kojima himself may never get to write anotherMetal Geargame again,he may compensate for his inability to retcon Snake’s origins in his other works. We’ve already seen Luca Marinelli, an actor Kojima previously mentioned as his dream casting choice for Solid Snake in a hypotheticalMGSmovie, playing a Snake lookalike inDeath Stranding 2. It’s entirely possible that this character will be the version of Solid Snake Kojima would write if he had the chance to start again.
Kojima’splannedMetal Gearsuccessor,Physint, could also be an opportunity to explore untapped potential and mishandled plot devices from theMetal Gearseries. Unfortunately, we know even less about that game than we do aboutDeath Stranding 2at this point, and Kojima’s recent appearances suggestPhysintis still several years away. It could be a long time until we find out what’s going on there.
Still, the abrupt end ofMetal Gearand Kojima’s inability to wrap up or recontextualize Snake’s story exactly how he wanted is more than a little disappointing. We’ll likely never see another Kojima-directedMetal Geargame, but at the very least, we can take comfort in the fact that he’s learned from his regrets in his later career.
