Trouble in Paradise. How Hideo Kojima Brought Hollywood to Video Games?

With a strong position in Konami, Hideo Kojima wanted to take his games with the fans even further. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (the game that was supposed to be, of course, the last installment of the series, and ironically, it actually was – not by Hideo's decision) was first announced at the Spike Video Game Awards in 2012, as a brand new IP, The Phantom Pain, supposedly created by a Swedish studio Moby Dick. Fans of MGS delivered – based on the few hints, they discovered that the game is neither a new IP, nor developed by Swedes, and that it's just the good old Kojima taking them for a ride again.

Silent Hills, on the other hand – the new installment of the withering, yet still classic series that was given to Kojima, was announced with a release of a mysterious demo of a horror entitled P.T. Finishing it – which wasn't at all simple without the solution, wasn't easy, and revealed that in reality, it's just an announcement of the new project of the creator of Metal Gear, and at the same time, a new game in the Silent Hill universe.

Koji-ception?

However, with only a few months left before the release of The Phantom Pain, unsettling reports began to leak from Konami. We didn't believe them at first. It seemed impossible that the man who was, for all intents and purposes, the face of the Japanese company, could be fired from it. However, not much time passed; in 2015, we received confirmation of this information. Kojima was not only dismissed – his team was disbanded, and Silent Hills – deleted, and to add insult to injury, the bizarre decision was taken to also delete all the information about his participation in previous productions. The 30 years that Hideo Kojima spent in Konami, was suddenly blown into smithereens.

The unclear nature of these events led to many people to consider them just another elaborate artifice from Kojima – a shocking advertising campaign for MGS-V from the man who likes manipulating the emotions of the fanbase. Even today, four years after the whole thing, when Kojima is close to finishing his new game in his own studio, there are still plenty of people believing that this is all part of some extremely complex advertising plan for Death Stranding. The years of deception taught players prudence and distrust, making them keen on looking for conspiracies and a larger plan in everything Kojima does.

The Internet quite bluntly summed up the way Konami acted.

Today, we don't know why Hideo was actually fired from Konami. The most reliable, and perhaps least sensational, theory suggests that it was simply about the money. Kojima wanted to make the Phantom Pain his biggest work and was willing to polish the game as much as possible, sinking untold millions of dollars in the production until the game would simply be unprofitable. The board of the corporation eventually had enough of it. The theory was actually confirmed by Kojima, who, while still working for Konami, casually admitted that

The famous developer must have known how dangerous his statements and actions were:

An artist confident in his genius, eager to develop uncompromising, timeless games, versus a rapacious board, which is having an increasingly hard time keeping his ambitions in check – it's pretty easy to imagine this conflict. There were also the plausible allegations that the CEO of Konami became spellbound by the mobile games market, able to provide income comparable to AAA games at a much lower cost, and that Kojima just didn't fit into that picture. What's much more surprising were the rumors of the scandalous behavior of Konami's employees, who were allegedly trying to make it difficult for the devs who left along Kojima to find new jobs – it would be bewildering if the people running such a huge company turned out that narrow-minded. Regardless of the reasons for the dismissal, the conflict could certainly be resolved more elegantly.