“What I really wanted to do is something like what they did with Tom and Jerry, with the orchestra watching the performances and timing their music to the actions with symbols and stuff. I want to do that with games so that the music changes in time with what the player is doing.”
Kojima set out his dream of “automated music” for games: today games mostly play back recordings, and although in Metal Gear and Death Stranding he has for years used layered reactive music — for example when the player infiltrates only the bass plays, if discovered percussion and melody enter, hidden the rhythm, the melody grows as an enemy approaches — those are prefabricated patterns. What he wants is what orchestras did for Tom and Jerry, watching the action and timing music to each gesture: music that is arranged in real time according to what each player does — the same melody and key but different arrangements for each person — which is impossible today because memory is split between sound, graphics and the program, but feasible via the cloud, calculated and emitted frame by frame. There would be no single fixed soundtrack: a composer’s base (the ending would sound the same for everyone) and program-generated arrangements — more the program than an AI — different for each player; and because tempo would alter player actions, music and game would feed back on each other. He even fantasized about digitizing all Vangelis’s gear and sound data to put into a game like this, and dated the idea: he thinks this will become reality in 5 or 10 years.
“What I want to do is automated music. For example, Vangelis is no longer with us, but we could digitize all of Vangelis' equipment and sound data and put it into a game and make the music change automatically, depending on the player's actions. […] When the player infiltrates an area, background music begins playing, but just the bass part. […] but it's really only working with a series of prefabricated patterns. […] I think this will definitely become a reality in 5 or 10 years.”