With Policenauts, I made almost everything on my own. So it's really…

“So, we could put audio on there, and now games could talk. No one had made anything with CD-ROMs yet.”

“Personally, I thought that Snatcher was not a success.”

Kojima wrote that on Policenauts he did almost everything himself — game design, a massive amount of dialogue, the adventure scripts written in simplified language, the storyboards, hit detection, flag management and even the image and sound calls — and that if Metal Gear Solid, made by a team of 100 people, is a Hollywood commercial film, Policenauts is closer to an independent film: in every sense his own colour shows.

In a text written for Konami's website, Kojima described Policenauts as his most difficult birth: it took four years from planning to the first commercialization and six years in total including later conversions. During that time his department changed three times, and the organization, his position and his work environment changed repeatedly, while the world moved — the Berlin Wall disappeared and the Cold War structure collapsed — and they were also struck by a large, unexpected earthquake.

Kojima wrote that during those six turbulent years he kept creating Policenauts as if possessed, and that although the project many times came close to running aground, curiously he never gave up even once; he added that even today he does not really understand how he could concentrate for so long on a single imaginary world.