| Hideo Kojima: Game Guru, Movie Maniac By Steven Kent It's not often that sequels propel game designers to stardom, but that's precisely what happened in Hideo Kojima's case. None of Kojima's first efforts, all of which were written for a Japanese home computer system, were published. His first published game was Metal Gear, which did reasonably well as a computer game and extremely well as a console game. The next Metal Gear game, Snake's Revenge, did good business, too, but practically went unnoticed when compared to the success of another Ultra game for the NES-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Metal Gear had largely faded into the memories of older gamers when Konami announced a new installment for PlayStation at the 1997 Electronic Entertainment Expo. Metal Gear Solid basically existed as a storyline and pictures when Konami first announced it. In 1998, however, Konami first introduced the game to thousands of players by sending out demo discs, then released the game in the fall. Metal Gear Solid was a major international hit. Having just finished work on Metal Gear Solid Integral, which was released in Japan last Spring, Kojima has become Konami's best-known designer-ever. (Yoshiki Okamoto is better known than Kojima, but no one knew him before he left Konami and made a name for himself at Capcom.) |