Interview: Hideo Kojima Talks About Metal Gear Solid V's Humor, Violence and Finality

“Every game I make, I create thinking it's really, really going to be the last game I create. So I put as much as I can in and make sure I have no regrets.”

“And the content of the game, what is really the essence of the game, hasn't moved much beyond Space Invaders. It's the same old thing, that the bad guy comes and without further ado the player has to defeat him. The content hasn't changed — it's kind of a void.”

“I know that no one would ever wear a box in war, but I want to change the mood, relieve the stress and tension and control a little bit the feelings of the player by letting them calm down and relax for a second and then continue through the mission.”

“In the case of a movie, in the end it's a different character separate from you executing all these actions. But in the game, it depends on you. It depends on your will to execute, to do something, to be violent or not.”

“There are so many games where you fight aliens or zombies, and they have very high-fidelity graphics, but they don't ask the question of why the events are happening. In Metal Gear, I'm trying to get at why all these violent things happened in the first place.”

“I think that's part of my role, part of my duty, to put in my games what I experience through movies, to explore this philosophy that movies gave me. I want to provide something similar to people through the games I create.”

“it's not about the engine, it's not about the graphical fidelity, because I'm not trying to portray violence. I'm trying to portray what is violence itself.”

“It's not only about my political views, but I really like movies. I try to watch a movie a day, if not more, and through movies I learned about so many different political themes I hadn't been interested in and cultural things I hadn't been aware of and economic factors I hadn't thought about.”

“Originally I wanted to hand the series off to younger staff and let them carry on with it. And so we did, and that resulted in the game Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. But after Rising, we found that for my younger staff, the numbered games were just too heavy for them. So that's why I decided to come back and work on them myself.”