Buried in the fuzz of an otherwise unstartling SSENSE interview with Hideo Kojima, a sudden spike of violence. “People who are making military games, they probably don’t know how to dismantle a gun or shoot a gun,” said the Metal Gear man, in amongst pictures of himself dressed as various Minecraft skinpacks. “So that’s kind of sad.” Does Kojima know how to dismantle a gun? “Yes, because I’ve been doing this training as well, and I learned so many ways to kill people as well.”
Pretty big talk for a guy who likes to go out on rooftops and cosplay as a sail. I don’t know how to shoot a gun myself, Kojima, unless you count the sniper rifle I fired at a Sniper Elite press event in 2012, but I know a bazillion other ways of ushering my enemies off to the pearly gates, and only half of them are from Hanna Barbera cartoons. Here’s a quick rundown to show you I’m serious business.
- Draw a nice warm bath for my adversary in a copper bath tub on a very high hill under a very tall tree sprinkled with iron filings during a thunderstorm
- Get all up in my adversary’s grill and invite them to “step outside”, while standing in a space station
- Hack my adversary’s internet history and expose their deep and abiding love of all the things they say they hate on social media
- Exchange my adversary’s favourite earphones for some carefully painted Black Widow spiders
- Build a mile-long chain of dominoes of relentlessly increasing size
- Paint very small images of calm blue skies on the inside of my adversary’s flying goggles
- Place a tactical guillotine on the other side of a fence with a hole labelled “free hat”
- Photoshop evidence of my adversary playing patticake patticake with the spouse of the local mafia boss
- Challenge my adversary to a friendly unranked game of “who can drink the most nail polish”, then sportingly let them go first
- Shoot them with a gun. How hard can it be. You just have to remember which end is the bangy one and wait for the button prompt
There isn’t much else of note in the interview. The second spiciest moment is the revelation that Kojima found this year’s Summer Game Fest trailer deluge dull, presumably not including the trailer for his own latest game, Death Stranding 2.
“Even the visuals and the systems are pretty much the same,” he said of the games on show, “and a lot of people enjoy this, I understand, but it is important to put something really new in there for the industry.” I can’t judge how “new” Death Stranding 2 is because Auntie Sony ain’t put it on PCs yet, but I bet it doesn’t let you kill people with dominoes.
