Hideo Kojima is infamously known for his long scenes these days, but he was once much more cautious with them.
There are many players who don’t like long scenes. After all, the point of a game is to play it, right? However, Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima hasn’t cared about that for quite some time, and the fourth game in the espionage series holds the record for the longest continuous scene in any game at a whopping 71 minutes until today. Except, interestingly, Kojima didn’t always seem very interested in including such long scenes. As discovered by Shmupulations (thanks, GamesRadar), in a 1997 interview with Famitsu, the iconic game developer talked about all things Metal Gear Solid before its release on the original PlayStation.
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Interestingly, the topic of cutscenes came up, where Kojima said the following: “However, the only thing I want to avoid are those tedious cutscenes where the characters are just jabbering at each other for 4 or 5 minutes.” Only four or five minutes! Kojima, my friend, if only you knew what the future held for you (let’s not forget that 71 minutes might be the longest scene Kojima has under his belt, but several of his other games have long scenes as well).
He even seemed a little reluctant to add scenes, despite his known love of film, saying that he was “concerned about the cinematic presentation. For the direction to be effective, I feel I will have to add scenes that cannot be omitted.” The story of Metal Gear is very complicated, so I think the scenes will be necessary.”
These days, we can obviously see Kojima thinking differently about cutscenes, and with Death Stranding 2 on the way next year (with a weird photo mode to boot), time will only tell if he beats his record. Cross your fingers and do it, if only because it would be fun.
