The creator of the Metal Gear Solid series, Hideo Kojima, has recently revealed that he believes the series’ radio communication system is one of his greatest inventions ever. While it seems fairly mundane by today’s standards, the game designer defends that this Metal Gear Solid feature was a game-changer.Hideo Kojima is one of the most famous Japanese game developers in the industry. He started his career at Konami back in the 80s and is responsible for several hits such as the whole Metal Gear franchise, Policenauts, and the famous P.T. prototype. However, Kojima almost left the game industry in the early 2000s. Just before the release of Metal Gear Solid 2, Kojima was anguished over 9/11 and the fact that the game featured the World Trade Center. Doubts about the repercussion of the launch almost made him scrap the game and leave Konami. Fortunately, he continued his career, working there until 2015, when he left and then founded Kojima Productions, the current independent studio he’s working for at the moment.Now, Hideo Kojima took some moments off the development of Death Stranding 2 to remember one of his greatest past achievements. In a recent tweet, Kojima affirmed that the radio communication system was one of his best inventions in game design. The idea came up during the development of Metal Gear Solid because he wanted players to infiltrate areas alone. That was partly due to the technical limitations of controlling several NPCs during the action. Therefore, using voice support was a handy choice, as players would be directed using only audio, which was easier and cheaper to implement than a full-fledged team system.
The radio system was fairly functional and, according to the designer, based on what special forces were using at the time to communicate during similar situations. Using it, it was possible to develop Metal Gear Solid’s character arcs and story while giving crucial gameplay information to players from afar. It was an elegant solution that was used throughout the whole franchise and then copied by many similar games in the genre.
Hideo Kojima’s creativity seems to be far from over, though. His latest game, Death Stranding, is being adapted into a movie, and he has already come up with bold promises for it. For instance, the game developer claims that the Death Stranding movie will be quite different from the game. According to Kojima, most game movies try to cater to games and end up being fairly unimpressive adaptations. So, he wants to take the direction to show people something that was not tried before.