Every week they paid for us to visit a forest in the mountains…

“There was a sort of legend at Konami, that if you got involved in this project, you'd up demoted or transferred. (laughs) [...] once we got a working build running, and they saw that exclamation mark pop up when the enemy gets surprised, that sold them on the concept.”

“We use wind, rain, steam and other effects to make the players feel as though they're really there. It may look like a film, but it doesn't play like a film--it's more of an event.”

“We had so much more budget so we were able to go to Hollywood and hire a composer.”

According to Konami’s 25th anniversary website, the project’s original objective was to make a war game, but the MSX2 could not display many enemy soldiers on a single screen nor more than four bullets at once, so Kojima proposed a game about fleeing the enemy in the style of the film The Great Escape: with the rule of escaping without fighting, the tension of war could be conveyed without many enemies on screen.

“We used like 500 or 600 eggs, but we couldn't throw them out, so the staff was going to eat them.”