ON PROJECT ITOH
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Compiled from an interview with Hideo Kojima
February 12, 2010
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MARCH 1998. I remember first meeting Itoh-san during the Spring ’98 Tokyo Game Show. I was in the exhibitor’s booth for Metal Gear Solid, to be released that September, when a young man called my name. I turned to see who it was and saw his face streaming with tears. Here, amid the clamor and festivities of the Game Show, one young man was crying. Later, he would become the novelist Project Itoh.
At the booth, we showed a trailer of in-game footage I’d compiled and edited. The preview had brought Itoh-san to tears, and now he talked to me earnestly. Before that moment, I’d never met a fan who so loved Metal Gear Solid, and I remember being moved. From then on, Itoh-san sent me fan letters and even Metal Gear doujinshi—fanzines—created by him and his friends. I eventually heard he had a website, and I would take a look at it from time to time.
Still, my relationship with Itoh-san remained nothing more than that of a game creator and a passionate fan. This may sound cold to some readers, but I don’t ever think of fostering one-on-one connections with my fans. And I feel this way even today—I’m just on the delivery end and mustn’t directly exchange with the consumers. The messages and presents and web comments are the most crucial nourishment for my work, and of course I’m grateful for them each and every day. But I feel the only way I can properly respond to them is through my creations, my games. So I never did anything to encourage Itoh-san. For a time, our relationship wasn’t mutual, it was one-way.
Change came to our relationship in September 2001, right before 9/11.
I heard from members of the Konami team that Itoh-san had been hospitalized, possibly with cancer. I want to do something for him, I thought, then when I thought of him on his sickbed, I wondered, But what can I do for him? The answer I came up with was, of course, a game. We had met because of my game, Metal Gear Solid. That provided the only answer. I recorded cut scenes from the still-in-progress Metal Gear Solid 2 onto a MiniDV cassette and took it to his hospital room. He put on a composed front, but it couldn’t mask his dark expression. An uncertain future left him depressed. It wasn’t much, but from his bedside, I showed him the ending scene of the Tanker segment.
Normally, we can’t show people outside the company even a portion of a work-in-progress. But it was all I could do for him, so I let him see it.
“I won’t die until you finish the game.” That was what Itoh-san said, to my relief, when the clip ended.
In November 2001, we managed to release Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty as planned. I invited Itoh-san to the press conference, and he attended the reception. He had been through a serious operation, and I was pained to watch him walking with a cane, but I was glad to see him. He kept his promise. When I look back at it now, I think that was the moment he went in my mind from being a fan to a friend.
Metal Gear Solid 2 was greatly anticipated, but the initial response to its release was sharply divided. The game has since gained a reputation, but at the time, I would become depressed when I saw what people wrote in comments and reviews—about the new character, Raiden; that the message at the end was too strong; and that the story was too abstruse for a gamer audience. Itoh-san was the first to understand me. On his personal website, he wrote an article saying, “I’m the only one happy with this kind of game!” Someone understood the riddles and messages I put into my games. I felt that simple fact saved me.
I think that was when Itoh-san had an awakening and set forth on the author’s path. One time, Itoh-san asked me to look at a manga written by him and drawn by his friend. I was happy at the chance to read it, but to be blunt, his work didn’t really do anything for me. True, he had abundant knowledge and an uncanny power of understanding. He was able to grasp points in my games that most of my fans missed. One of my works before Metal Gear Solid, Policenauts, featured as part of its theme the notion that a space colony would have to become a highly medicalized society, but very few understood its inevitability. But Itoh-san got it, along with the reveal in Metal Gear Solid that Liquid’s group sought Big Boss’s corpse, and the twist in Metal Gear Solid 2 when Snake’s NPO becomes designated a terrorist organization. He delighted in them, saying, “This is science fiction!” But I had doubts about his creative potential, as opposed to his discernment as a gamer.
Then he began to change. It started with the quality of his writings on his blog, followed by his online movie reviews. I can’t quite find the right words to explain it, but I was seeing something like a new perspective within his writing. Looking back at it, I think the change came soon before he started writing Genocidal Organ. I can’t give a solid explanation, but perhaps the experience of a severe illness awakened the author within him. I imagine as he lived with death by his side, his perceptions underwent a major shift.
When I read Genocidal Organ, I was shocked. It was something only Itoh-san could have written; delicate, yet dreadful, and even endearing. Project Itoh the writer was born. Apparently, in a later interview, Itoh-san said that the short story serving as the basis for Genocidal Organ had been fan fiction of my early game Snatcher. But in the novel I saw reflections of the Metal Gear Solid series. And so I didn’t hesitate to approach him for the novelization of Metal Gear Solid 4.
We made the first plans for the novelization in January 2008. When Itoh-san entered the meeting room cane in hand, he emanated an author’s aura. Gone was the fragility of the young man crying at the Tokyo Game Show booth just ten years prior. He had the dignified countenance of an author. I think this was the first time Itoh-san and I exchanged words as two creators.
Before we knew it, the plans had been made. I wanted the novel to be based on Metal Gear Solid 4, but also, so that those who hadn’t played the rest of the series could understand, to include characters, history, and settings from the Metal Gear saga. I wanted it to be written and composed so that it would be accessible to younger readers, and I wanted the novel to express the themes of MGS4. He took our unreasonable list of demands and checked them off one by one. He came up with the ideas of making Otacon the narrator and omitting the Beauty and the Beast Unit, boss characters crucial to the themes and game design of MGS4, to instead let series regulars embody the themes. In almost no time at all, the basic concepts of the novel had been set.
Then, with tremendous enthusiasm, he went to work.
The first draft soon arrived, and it surpassed my expectations. There was even a feeling, I have to say a nice feeling, of entrusting my own creation to a third party. Of course he recreated the themes I’d put into the game, the emotions of my characters, and the turns of the story, but vividly present in Itoh-san’s prose were different aspects of the story I’d never realized were there, and motifs hidden within the setting. There’s a phrase, “reading between the lines.” Itoh-san gathered meaning and details and feelings between the letters of the game script. This wasn’t merely a carbon copy of the game in novel form.
After the game and the novel were released, I settled on the plot for my next project. After Metal Gear Solid 2, whenever I finished creating a game, I always first looked to see if it made Itoh-san happy. And not just then, but during production I would wonder, Will he take to this story, to this setting, to these characters? I had it in my head that my next game would be set in Costa Rica in 1974. On the timeline it would come after Metal Gear Solid 3. It takes place during the Cold War, when an unknown military group engages in secret operations within the peaceful, defenseless Central American nation. Naked Snake’s Militaires Sans Frontieres are brought in to stop them. The game is Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.
I wanted to ask Itoh-san to collect my new story with Metal Gear Solid 3 into a single novel. My next chance to talk with him came unexpectedly.
February 2009. In the hospital, Itoh-san’s condition was not good. So far he had won every battle in the long fight with his illness, but I was told that this time he might not make it. I dropped everything and rushed to see him. Itoh-san was in bed, and I talked about what movies I’d seen and what books I’d read recently, but his expression was blank, and he wasn’t able to say much in return. I thought, I want him to get his spark back. I don’t want him to give up living. So I started to tell him about Peace Walker. I told him about Costa Rica and the theme of nuclear deterrence, about the secret struggle between intelligence agencies in the Cold War, about the AI weapon straight out of 70s’ sci-fi, about Snake and the other characters, and as I talked he regained more and more of his smile. And then, just like before, he told me, “I won’t give up until you’re done.”
At that point I hadn’t publicly announced a single aspect of my plans for the game. Itoh-san was the first person outside the company to hear any details, just as it had been with Metal Gear Solid 2. The only real difference between the events of 2001 and 2009 was that this time, Itoh-san couldn’t keep his promise.
There is a scene in this novel in which Naomi teaches the struggling Sunny the trick to making fried eggs. That scene, of course, is also in the game, but as Itoh-san writes it, even that moment is a story handed to Sunny by Naomi. Even in the morning’s fried eggs a story dwells—a story not expressed in my game. I believe this novel is Project Itoh’s Metal Gear Solid.
Would this game make Itoh-san happy? That standard is part of what the story of Project Itoh means to me. Therefore, Project Itoh already dwells inside my game. Itoh-san took this game, retold it, and handed me back his own Metal Gear Solid. Like a double helix. Such a wonderful game of catch.
Because of the existence of a man called Itoh-san, I’ve experienced a happiness difficult for a creator to obtain.
Project Itoh-san, thank you.