Shift into a New 'Gear'

Jamin Brophy-Warren - Associated Press

Ever since childhood, videogame producer Hideo Kojima, 44 years old, has wanted to be a film director. In grade school, he borrowed a friend's videocamera to shoot a zombie movie, but by college he had abandoned filmmaking completely. More than 30 years later, Mr. Kojima is finally fulfilling his childhood wish - although not in the way he might have expected.

Next week, Konami will release one of the most anticipated videogame titles of the year, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, for Sony's PlayStation 3. The Metal Gear series, which debuted in 1987, has been one of the most popular franchises for any game, selling more than 22 million copies around the world so far. Gamers have praised the military action game for its emphasis on stealth over gunplay.

Mr. Kojima has garnered a reputation for making games that have the visual sweep and intertwining storylines of feature films, and "Guns" is his most ambitious attempt yet to blur the line between videogames and movies. Videogames typically feature brief movie-like interludes, or "cut scenes," between levels. "Guns" features some of the longest cut scenes ever, some about 15 minutes long.

As with Mr. Kojima's past releases, early reviews for the new game have been overwhelmingly positive. The game has already received a 95 out of a possible 100 from videogame-ratings aggregator Metacritic.com. In another sign of his superstar status in the videogame world, Mr. Kojima will be touring more than 12 cities in the U.S. and abroad in the coming weeks, including New York, signing copies of "Guns" and fans' PlayStations.

The Metal Gear series follows Solid Snake, a grizzled, war-hardened soldier, as he attempts to combat iterations of a superweapon known as "Metal Gear," an upright walking tank with the ability to launch nuclear warheads. Each title fleshes out more of Snake's history and that of a clandestine organization known as "the Patriots." "Guns" follows Snake as he tries to eliminate a terrorist named Liquid Ocelot against the backdrop of world consumed by war and controlled by private military corporations.

Metal Gear Solid is important for Sony's PlayStation 3, which has trailed its rival consoles: Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360. As with past versions of Metal Gear Solid, "Guns" will be an exclusive for Sony's platform, which had a surge during the first quarter this year.

"There are few software brands that directly move hardware units and, in our estimation, Metal Gear Solid is one of those brands," says Scott Steinberg, vice president of product marketing for Sony Computer Entertainment of America. "It's possibly the biggest exclusive for 2008."

But not all assessments are so rosy. Evan Wilson, a senior research analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, says low consumer interest in high-definition content and the higher cost for the PS3 compared with its predecessor have been the chief barriers for the PS3, not a lack of titles like "Guns." "In this cycle, the majority of people that want to buy Metal Gear Solid 4 already have a PS3," he says.

The son of medical researchers, Mr. Kojima was born in Tokyo but moved to the then-rural Kansai region in the South. He was fascinated by art, particularly the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, whose multifarious talents as an artist as well as inventor and scientist appealed to Mr. Kojima's fledgling artistic interests.

Yet Mr. Kojima was forced to sublimate those interests for more practical pursuits. Pressure from his parents to pursue a "steady life" and his father's death in high school pushed Mr. Kojima to study economics at university. "Even while studying economics, I was always thinking of how I could shoot a movie," he said through an interpreter.

In 1986, however, Mr. Kojima found Famicom, an early videogame system that read special yellow disks and was extremely popular in Japan. He purchased a system for about $200, using part of his college scholarship and money that he earned as a gardener and wedding cinematographer. "I was playing all day sometimes and skipped school. Quite a few classes I missed," he said. He saw a future in the world of Super Mario Bros., which played on the system, and joined Konami as a game planner that year after graduation.

"Looking back, if my father was alive I wouldn't have been allowed to enter the game industry," Mr. Kojima said. Even his friends laughed at his career decision, once announcing him at a wedding as "a crazy guy with a lot of talent who went to the games industry instead." His first solo game design, an action game called Lost Warld, was shelved after six months, in part, Mr. Kojima says, because he was new to managing staff members and creating a schedule. Dejected and reconsidering his career decision, he brought his next idea to a pitch meeting: a stealth game based loosely on one of his favorite films, "The Great Escape." He called it Metal Gear.

The game was a hit. After a follow-up in 1990, the turning point for Mr. Kojima came in 1998 with the release of Metal Gear Solid for the Sony's fledgling PlayStation system. Rendered in 3D for the first time, the series enhanced its breakthrough trademark: stealth.

In sharp contrast to the popularity of first-person shooting games, Metal Gear's characters are required to sneak through missions rather than annihilating everyone on sight. In fact, drawing attention to your character's presence can make the game more difficult. Metal Gear Solid has received acclaim for its "Close Quarters Combat" system, which gives Snake an array of sneak attacks such as knocking a guard unconscious or robbing him at gunpoint.

Mr. Kojima says the stealth idea partly rose from a technical constraint for the game's original platform, the MSX computer. "You couldn't really display a lot of bullets or a lot of enemies at once. Without those limitations Metal Gear wouldn't have been born."

As the technical capabilities of videogame consoles grew, it allowed Mr. Kojima to return to his first love: film. "Guns" builds on the rest of the Metal Gear story through its cinematic cut sequences, which have become increasingly lifelike. "I couldn't give up on the dream of being a movie director or author," he said. "Back then it was two-dimensional but now it's full 3D and the color and quality is catching up to the movies."

And the storyline is growing more intricate as well. In one sequence, Snake's relationship with another soldier, Meryl Silverburgh, hints at a romantic contretemps, but relies on a player's understanding of their encounters from the second game in the series for context. Figuring out the motives behind characters or why Snake's mission is so important requires a deeper understanding of the Metal Gear canon.

That raises a larger question for videogames that are being positioned as cinema. For players who haven't finished previous titles, how are they supposed to follow a story?

Konami says the intricate backstory won't be a barrier to new players. "It helps you to know who the characters are but, just for a layman picking up the game, you're going to get a great experience," says Anthony Crouts, U.S. vice president of marketing for Konami. "It's a different experience but still just as rewarding."

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Copyright 2012 by Associated Press