Hideo Kojima has openly said he won’t play Konami’s Metal Gear Solid Delta remake. However, the team behind the project says they’d still like him to see it and hopes the result respects the original vision. It’s a tidy little drama that comes with decades of franchise baggage.
The remake revisits Metal Gear Solid 3, and producer Noriaki Okamura told Inverse in a new interview that the team aims to be very respectful of the people who worked on the original. “We are not sure what he would want to do,” Okamura said, “but we want to deliver this game whilst being very respectful of all the people that we previously worked with.”
Okamura added, “We would love for [Kojima] to see it too.” Would he play it? Apparently not – Kojima laughed about the idea in an interview with Ssense, and told reporters plainly, “No, I won’t.”
Both Okamura and creative producer Yuji Korekado have a history with Kojima’s original Metal Gear projects, and they continually return to the sentiment that the core of the old game still retains charm and emotion, even after two decades. Okamura said the original concept didn’t need radical changes – it still had a lot to offer.
Kojima himself has elsewhere discussed the business side of owning an IP, and he has even said that he sees Metal Gear partly as his own. That might explain the distance he keeps from Konami’s new versions. He also mentioned that he has already written a concept for Death Stranding 3, but wants someone else to develop it.
Look, fair enough – creators get protective. The devs building Delta seem to be trying to tread carefully and preserve what mattered in the originals, and they’d like Kojima’s nod even if he won’t actually play the game. And hey, that whole business of IP and ownership isn’t exactly light reading for a fan forum.
