A Stealth Game: The Kojima Code, Part II

Preface

In setting out to write the sequel to my first book, The Kojima Code, the decision was made early on to cover only those topics which were both new and necessary to appreciating Hideo Kojima’s remaining works. There would be no need to repeat myself or prove my thesis about his creative temperament; I had already traced the evolution of his craftsmanship and psychology from the start of his career until 2003’s Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance. My intention, therefore, was to analyze each of his games from that point on, including 2019’s Death Stranding, his first independent venture. This seemed entirely possible to me at the time, as I believed my handy rule of thumb about only including new material would streamline the process. The grand origin story that was The Kojima Code had already laid the foundation, and everything else would stem from there. Only a little would be left to add along the way, I imagined.

Very quickly, however, I realized that I had miscalculated. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater alone had been so neglected from an analytical standpoint that it would require a great deal of attention, context, and explanation to appreciate. In particular, there was a certain thread of logic which seemed impossible to ignore once it dawned on me: a commentary on the War on Terror and the obscure roots of Western technocracy that I, at least, had never noticed before. I became determined to do it justice, and set about documenting it properly. It was, after all, necessary and new. That effort took nearly two hundred pages, even while omitting a great deal of material that I could have added, so I began to worry that my plan was unrealistic.

Nevertheless, I was determined to cram the rest into this book even if it meant abbreviating entire games down to a few paragraphs. As the reader can clearly see, that plan failed. In the process of tracking the new ideas, I decided to embrace my new angle of analysis instead, born out of my discovery of Kojima’s secret polemic. That new angle led to this book’s title and its scope. I’m proud that it turned out this way, a worthy installment on its own terms, hopefully able to open the reader’s eyes to yet another level of meaning, just as I had experienced. The subjects we’ll explore are healthy, substantive, and in some ways more broadly relevant and rewarding than a purely meta-analysis angle. This book has forced me to do fascinating research on topics that I was not familiar with and certainly not expecting to discuss. They are perfectly compatible with and complementary to the existing (and still ongoing) meta side of the discussion, where Kojima’s personal life and feelings about the series become allegorized in the plots themselves. A new layer for a new book.

My apologies in advance to readers habituated to Kojima’s full capitalization of terms like FOXHOUND, RAY, REX, and so on. I have taken the liberty to resize them to having their first letters capitalized, like regular names. This is a style choice I made to spare confusion for those who would wonder what these words might stand for; they stand for nothing, and the choice to fully capitalize was a video game’s aesthetic choice that I don’t feel works well in a book format.

Let me also clarify that I wrote this book in late 2019, some months before the pandemic scare of 2020 and its ripple effects across society and the economy. Nothing was added in reaction to these events during the editing process, so any overlap in subjects or themes that exists is coincidental. My findings are derived from a study of the games and an investigation into their subjects and subtext, nothing more.

With this book, my hope is that we can celebrate yet another side of the enigmatic Japanese auteur for whom millions of fans around the world are grateful, and to whom we continue to look for innovation and inspiration.

Introduction

Collapse is always mesmerizing. It challenges our fundamental assumptions, and we watch it with awe and dissonance. One minute everything is normal and the next our reality is proven to be untrue, so untrue that it can no longer be propped up by the guardians of the status quo. Up becomes down, down becomes up, and we’re all left asking what the truth really was.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a generation of big thinkers collapsed the Old World and mapped out a new, more perfect one. The Greatest Generation lived through that transformation and undertook the building of the new age. The Baby Boomers inherited this freshly built world order, wasted little time in getting swept up in its opportunities and drunk on its excesses, and were ultimately tainted by its corruption. Generation X diagnosed this problem for everyone to see, and the Millennials have clumsily been collapsing it in their own way. It may not be a revolution, but a lot has been revolving: the top position has lowered to the bottom, and the bottom position has risen to the top. Things are not what they used to be. The visionary age is drying up, and the status quo cannot be maintained much longer. Vested interests are doing everything they can to prevent the collapse from becoming official.

It is the Millennials, with their mindless gaming and their selfish Internet habits, who have broken the back of the colossi. As we mentioned in the previous book, they have earned plenty of enemies in the process. Those vested interests don’t want to admit what’s happening, and if possible they would trick the world into thinking they are stronger than ever. They compensate for their failures with optics—the brave new world of shaping reality through shaping perceptions. They would have us believe that up has not gone down.

In a world of revolution and collapse, illusion and optics, there is no one more interesting to study than Hideo Kojima. He has turned controlled collapse into his own art form, and optics into his brand.

In The Kojima Code, I tracked the controversial designer’s rise to fame, then infamy, with the advent of a controlled collapse known as Metal Gear Solid 2. Game by game, I revisited and reconstructed not only the big ideas of his works, but their historical and cultural contexts. In doing so, my intent was to allow the reader to see things from the past’s point of view, where the outcome we’ve come to think of as inevitable can be seen instead as a shocking prospect. This is necessary to recognizing the importance of a man’s will, the driving forces within him and around him. We can begin to appreciate what it takes to forge one’s own destiny. We can appreciate the inheritance of another’s will. We can see how the torch of self-determination can be passed from one generation to the next, through art. From this point of view, we understand that the strong create the future, and therefore we should not look back on the past as the obvious path of least resistance, but the legacy of the victors. This is what Hideo Kojima believes, at least. He respects the carvers of history—the exons, not the introns.

This book will continue the pattern. I will continue to present not only the technological state of affairs along the way, but the personal and psychological: the influences and emotional baggage that drove Kojima’s most important decisions every step of the way, and the history that speaks to him. This means going back into uncharted territory in an unofficial, unauthorized, and unsanctioned capacity. This is where the truth hides. We will embrace the subjective. We are still interested in facts, but only as points of reference, often misleading on their own. This book is my best attempt to do Hideo Kojima’s work justice, and for that I am willing to go out on a limb once more.

A Stealth Game seeks to reveal the subtext linking Hideo Kojima’s most polarizing work with his most revered, and his most revered with his darkest. You will learn what these games represent, and what they don’t. You will also find out how to think like an analyst yourself, rather than being stuck in the mindset of a critic or a consumer. You will see how he was forced to fight for a new kind of freedom, and the price he was willing to pay for it. The journey is, once again, one of hubris, ambition, and stolid workmanship in the face of mounting doubts and ever-increasing stakes. The destination is a new world of insight.

Part One

Something to Prove

Chapter 1

Allegories

Hideo Kojima loves allegories. He’s always using metaphors to explain things. An allegory is what happens when we convert a whole subject into a metaphor, then explore that subject through the metaphor instead of regarding it literally. The subject itself could be anything: our personal feelings, a story we’d rather cloak in symbolism than share directly, or perhaps a worldview. An allegory can be as simple, advanced, strange, or predictable as the individual who creates it; there are no rules. A lot of poetry is allegorical. Often, it’s a way of powerfully expressing things that would be too personal, delicate, or difficult to explain if you just started spilling out the mess in your head. Rather than trying to explain how the death of a loved one affected you personally, which could end up sounding cliché despite being heartfelt, you can use imagery. You might depict it as an astronaut stuck in orbit, watching the world explode from outer space, powerless to stop it. A metaphor can be more thought-provoking than a literal discussion. It is truer than the truth.

An allegory is best conceived not as a particular narrative, but as a fully functional model of interconnected ideas that can be freely explored in any direction, even interacted with, not unlike the interactive space of a video game. They operate according to their own rules and logic, and we can interact with them by asking hypotheticals. Therefore, even though an allegory might be conveyed by telling a story, that story is just one path through the model, or one sequence of hypotheticals asked—one playthrough of the simulation. You can always go back and tinker with the logic some more. The next time somebody uses a metaphor to explain something, play with it. Sometimes they fall apart under scrutiny, and sometimes they become stronger. Tying a bunch of metaphors together into an allegory based on a real subject deepens its interactivity. In The Kojima Code we analyzed how the story of Metal Gear Solid 2 is an allegory exploring the player’s temptation to identify with their idealized hero, Solid Snake, despite sharing almost nothing in common with him in reality. It exposes the unflattering nature of fantasy and asks us to find meaning beyond the literal events of the fictional world, to look for meaning in the game’s vast range of topics and social commentary rather than merely associating ourselves with a badass mercenary who doesn’t even exist.

Kojima loves allegory for the same reason intellectuals always have. Emotionally, they’re more impactful than literal explanations in many cases, but they’re also deeply practical exercises in abstracting and conceptualizing complex topics. They can continue to reward the thinker with new discoveries and insights simply by exploring the allegory in new ways. How does that work? Think about it: a good allegory contains all of the relevant dynamics of the subject, so that every major factor is converted into an apt metaphor and expressed somehow. When you play it out, you learn logical outcomes. Somebody who has mixed feelings about a career choice might model it as a hyperactive but charming pet puppy, always causing problems for the owner despite being fundamentally cute and lovable. The puppy might have a bad habit of urinating on the owner’s flower bed, which represents the person’s friendships. It’s a tricky situation. What can you do about the puppy’s behavior without spoiling their innocent, manic energy? What should the owner prioritize? How much should the owner put up with from their wacky job—or, in the allegory, their crazy little pet puppy? There’s no clear answer. Modeled this way, the person’s real-life dilemma not only becomes more understandable to strangers, but the logic of the allegory can even suggest solutions or the workarounds that make sense. After all, if the metaphor is accurate, why shouldn’t the solution apply to real life?

Indeed, because an allegory is a mirror of the truth,¹ it means conversions can be made in both directions. Any viewer of the allegory can participate in the exploration, asking questions and interacting with it. In theory, we should be able to use any insight we have about the real-life subject to further interrogate and explore the allegory. Its particularities and curiosities can become accessible. We convert real knowledge into allegorical knowledge. For example, in the metaphor of the astronaut and the exploding planet, we might know some facts about the loved one who died, and then logically guess how those facts would be symbolized in the allegory or recognize them within it. These insights can serve as keys we can use to unlock parts of the allegory, which, in turn, provide even more insight about the subject and how it’s described. Perhaps the loved one and the creator of the allegory share an affinity for some hobby. In that case, we might expect to see the hobby represented in the spacecraft of the main character. It might be an object, tool, or reminder of the planet that is now gone. Once we recognize the key in the allegory, all of the character’s interactions with that object take on a new meaning: perhaps they throw it away and let it go, or perhaps they use it to overcome a crucial challenge and keep it close. The details pick up a new layer of meaning that seemed arbitrary at first. If we didn’t know about the subject, we’d be left wondering why it was included at all, or where its inspiration was rooted. Truly bizarre creative choices in an allegorical story can suddenly become clever; arbitrary things suddenly become crucial in order to do the reality justice. A nonsensical progression of ideas can become profound and ironclad. It should go without saying that, when studying an allegory, it’s the symbolic part that is meaningful. All of the visible, literal, obvious parts are only important insofar as they function as mirrors of the subject: they should be paid attention to, but only because they carry information potentially relevant to the main subject. The details of an allegory can be completely asinine or contrived so long as the metaphor pays off when converted back into the discussion of the root subject. The more literal you are with an allegory, the more you actually miss the point. The fact that many, if not most, allegories are children’s fables with cartoonish characters, exaggeration, and warped logic perfectly illustrates this point. Picking apart the logic of a fable is a fool’s errand. You’re supposed to indulge an allegory for the sake of learning something, not take it seriously as an independent plot.

Perhaps the most famous allegory in literature is The Pilgrim’s Progress, written by seventeenth-century Puritan author John Bunyan. The full title makes the subject clear: The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream. It’s essentially a series of interlinked sermons told through a deeply intimate and topical but also theological story. It’s about a sinful man trying to get to heaven. Its status as a legendary allegory is owed not only to its being one of the first, best, and most enduring Puritan works of literature, but also to the fact that it chose to advertise itself as an allegory instead of a regular story with Christian messages embedded in it. It is structured as if it were a real, coherent story, following an actual character through the logic of a journey, but it wears its metaphors on its sleeve. This was—and still is—highly uncommon. Poems and parables often indulge the story format for a short time while they make their points, but then revert to abstract imagery or explanations to complete the discussion. In Pilgrim’s Progress, the whole thing is undeniably a story, but the characters are named things like Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Evangelist, and Hypocrisy, not hiding what they represent at all. In fact, every character has an allegorical label as a name, making them each a metaphor relevant to the main subject, worthy of interpretation. The main character’s name is literally Christian, and although his troubles are sometimes cryptic or vague, they are usually blatant commentaries on specific subjects meant to warn, encourage, or challenge the reader.

If only writers were more willing to admit when they had written allegories, we would see them everywhere. Countless movies, novels, and stories we’re familiar with contain symbolic narrative which is simply not acknowledged, so they are unofficial allegories. Direct commentaries on subjects using actual metaphors are out of fashion, and have been for at least a hundred years. Modern storytellers prefer to orient their settings and characters around genre conventions, character personalities, and vicarious impulses rather than moralizing symbolism. It’s not necessary to use allegory to tell a powerful story with lessons and morals. A non-allegorical story can still contain themes, allusions, and little morsels of commentary that can hit home and get a point across without being built and structured to service a core metaphor that dictates its logic. Still, even modern writers sneak metaphor and allegory into their creations without telling anyone. Converting their messy divorce, their childhood struggle, or perhaps just somebody else’s interesting story into their all-new setting and fiction can be easy inspiration.

There’s good reason to avoid drawing attention to symbolism. In the case of C.S. Lewis and his Narnia series, he denied outright the allegory label, not wanting all of his work to be reduced to a simple metaphor for Christianity. He liked his characters and settings on their own and wanted them to be appreciated apart from how they could be correlated to such a familiar subject. Allegorical interpretation has a way of consuming everything once it begins. It overshadows all the literal material the author is proud of. It filters the whole thing at once, discarding whatever isn’t metaphorical as meaningless, as we have noted already. The risks and rewards of employing allegory are not trivial, and becoming known as an author who does it can be a blessing and a curse.

Let’s set some terms straight, then. Themes are not the same as allegories. With a theme, all you need is a pattern—there doesn’t even need to be a metaphor involved. If a bunch of characters openly brag about having tattoos, and depictions of tattoos appear throughout the story for various reasons, then tattoos are naturally a theme. A theme can even be unintentional. Symbolism can be incidental too, although a canny writer will probably catch strong symbolism before they’re finished writing. It’s unlikely that a whole allegory would ever be accidental, though. There’s a shift in mentality from trying to write a good story that might include some metaphors along the way to building a story that revolves around your modeling of a subject. It means letting the story’s logic adhere to the model. I believe this is an important distinction.

When a video game designer is obsessed with allegory, perhaps it is inevitable that the worlds they build end up as digital metaphors. The characters, setting, choices, and challenges they design can all reflect truths. It’s not just a game or a narrative, but an immersive simulation of a subject’s complexity. If John Bunyan were alive today, would his pilgrim be a playable avatar in a virtual world of woes?

¹ Truth here is obviously subjective, but that’s not important. What’s important is that it’s an honest expression of a real subject, reflecting the reality of how the author sees something.

Chapter 2

This Town’s Not Big Enough . . .

The year is 1997, one year before Metal Gear Solid (MGS) is released on the PlayStation. A blue and white Chevrolet Caprice, long and low, is crossing the intersection at 725th Avenue, New York City, New York. They don’t make NYPD cruisers like that anymore, not even in 1997, but the style remains iconic. Behind it, looming high into the sky, is something even more iconic: the step-like diagonal-corner face of Trump Tower. It’s a low-quality photograph somebody probably took in the 1970s, blurry and underexposed in some parts, but that’s not what matters. What matters are the three words splayed across the photograph in a bulky, flamboyant typeface: Grand Theft Auto.

It’s no wonder the image was chosen as the backdrop for the game’s cover. The infamous 1970s permanently redefined New York City, for better or worse. Rampant unemployment, high crime rates, police crackdowns, heat waves, pimping, prostitutes, riots, blackouts, graffiti, narcotics, disco, night clubs, street gangs, punk, hip hop, newspaper sensationalism, sleaze, pornography, exploitation, and Donald Trump’s decadent millionaire lifestyle in the face of it all dominated the culture. The decade began with America finding out about COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgram), an extensive series of projects by the FBI designed to infiltrate activist groups and sabotage them from within, purportedly to stop allegedly Communist groups like anti-war demonstrators and civil-rights organizers, and ended with a 200,000-person rally against nuclear weaponry, held in New York City itself. Trust in the government was at an all-time low. The Vietnam War ended in 1975 and the veterans came home changed men. It was in this chaotic and transformative period that a new breed of filmmaker hit the scene and changed the way movies worked forever. Gritty, unglamorous, but strangely romanticized stories about the streets proliferated. Anti-establishment sentiment and cop-hating reached new heights. Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Saturday Night Fever, The Warriors, and many more classic films tried to capture or exaggerate various aspects of New York City’s sex, violence, and soul at the time. To this day it’s not unusual for storytellers to dip back into that well when they need a compelling setting. That particular blurry photo of Trump Tower, with those words emblazoned across it, carried implications far beyond the obvious.

In the next few years, the studio behind the Grand Theft Auto franchise changed ownership, growing substantially in the process, but never truly found fame under their original company name. They had called themselves DMA Design, and in case you were wondering, DMA stood for Doesn’t Mean Anything. They were cheeky British lads. Most people missed the double meaning, however. Of course it’s a prank on people who bother to ask what the three letters mean, but it’s also a statement about their games: a caution for gamers and critics alike to not take things they do too seriously. They don’t mean anything. It was a built-in disclaimer.

They liked to provoke people. Their first major success was Lemmings (1991), a game where you watch adorable little folk march to their deaths in a hundred different ways unless you quickly assign them tools and jobs so they can modify the stage enough to make that impossible. People loved it because it wasn’t simply a shock game meant to get a few laughs, but a real puzzle challenge. Their specialty was mixing dark humor with fun outrage, and Grand Theft Auto (GTA) was another perfect example. Although limited to basic bird’s-eye view and two-dimensional graphics, it was an instant success, allowing players to freely explore three large, lively cities that seemed to go about their business constantly. You play as a crook for hire, receiving dubious jobs from payphones and committing gleeful crime sprees of murder, theft, and car chases, and even the slaughter of law enforcement, in your attempts to pull off the gigs and get away with them. The characters were all tiny little sprites from a distance, pretty much unrecognizable from the top down, but if you ran them over or mowed them down with weaponry, they’d lie flat so you could see their whole body. There were plenty of weapons, but no real rules about where you had to go or what you had to do. Instead, there was a system of points, rewards, and deterrence. You needed to reach a certain dollar amount to get to the next city and unlock a new set of missions: Liberty City was the first, Vice City the second, and San Andreas the third. These are satirical rip-offs of New York City, Miami, and Los Angeles, respectively. There was a spiffy multiplier system that rewarded you for not getting arrested or dying, and running over pedestrians while driving a cop car even gave you double points. Wherever you went, you could hear police chatter about your illegal activities. Picking up a certain icon on the map would trigger a Kill Frenzy, instantly granting you a heinous weapon like a flamethrower and requiring you to murder a certain number of people with it to fulfill the quota. If you failed, you kept the Wanted Level you built up during this time and had to deal with the consequences of your actions, but if you succeeded you instantly received a full pardon and a lot of points. It didn’t have to make real sense. It was an excuse to go wild. The freedom to choose how you accomplished your dirty jobs and when to pursue them was innovative and addictive. The game world just existed on its own without strict objectives; the story basically provided opportunities for fun and unlocked new stuff to use creatively.

The bottom line? Crime paid in GTA’s fictional America. The game was released in the European territory on MS-DOS, Windows, and the PlayStation at the same time, and then a few months later in North America. MGS hit the scene with its surreal, somber cinematics less than a year later with a comparatively noble mission to elevate the medium to new artistic heights. Kojima’s games, unlike those of DMA Design, would try very hard to mean something.

Fast forward to 2001, and despite success of the original GTA and its 2D successors, nothing could have prepared the gaming world for the monumental accomplishment that was GTA’s third main entry. It was released only twenty-two days before Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (MGS2) and was also a PlayStation 2 exclusive set in New York City—reimagined once again as Liberty City for the sake of satire. Unlike its predecessors, this time the world was amazingly three-dimensional, with fully voiced characters and loveable art style. It had flair, confidence, and a heavily cinematic storyline inspired by Goodfellas and the HBO phenomenon The Sopranos. A whole new vision of gaming had arrived. It was revolutionary.

Like anything that has changed the course of history, it’s hard to appreciate while you’re living in its wake. Let’s take a moment to appreciate what it did, and how it lined up with the postmodern spectacle of MGS2. It begins with light jazz music. Opening credits are accompanied by a slow montage of in-game city scenes, both at day and night. It takes its sweet time, setting a mood of casual New York slum life instead of trying to excite the player with action. By the time it’s done, we’re itching to get started. Then we see a street at night, and the front of a bank. We hear intriguing music. A sports car speeds up to the bank, swerving on the street to line up with the alleyway adjacent. Next, the music bursts into hectic drums as the back door of the bank is kicked open, the alarm sounds, and three armed criminals rush out in a hurry. Your character, the last one out, follows the woman and another man. But as soon as he rounds the corner he is stopped short by the woman, now aiming her pistols at him. Sorry babe, I’m an ambitious girl, she says, pulling the trigger while we see her up close from the perspective of the man being shot. And you’re just small time. As our protagonist falls to the ground, we watch her pick up the money and saunter off without looking back.

The next shot is a newspaper with our face on it. We’re labeled as the bank robber betrayed by his girlfriend/accomplice, answering the question of who the woman was. We’ve also apparently been convicted in court and are being transferred to prison. The story is moving at breakneck speed. We suddenly see ourselves in an orange jumpsuit in the back of a police van being escorted by a squad car and hear a news reporter explaining that there was an attack on the very convoy we are currently watching. It’s dark and raining outside. The vehicles pull onto a large suspension bridge. If we didn’t know better, we might expect to see Solid Snake walking across it, smoking a cigarette with a rubber poncho as he waits for an oil tanker carrying a Metal Gear. The overlap with the opening of Sons of Liberty at this exact moment in gaming history is an unbelievable coincidence.

The bridge assault isn’t aimed at rescuing you, but it inadvertently frees all the prisoners. You and a fellow inmate escape together. He sets you up with a contact to get work for the mafia, and the bridge leading to the other parts of the city will remain damaged until you finish enough missions and progress the story. Despite having good reasons to follow the plot, players are free to ignore the story altogether and amuse themselves in the world. Many did exactly that, and only discovered there were more areas of the map to unlock later. It was dizzying enough from the start.

Grand Theft Auto III (GTAIII) rocked the gaming world in exactly the way that MGS2 didn’t. The critical hype around Kojima’s postmodern prank—betraying everything fans wanted in order to make a point about video game power fantasy—was far greater, thanks to its celebrated predecessor and its incredible E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Expo in LA) trailers, but the reality of its twists and turns created nothing but confusion and sour taste in its wake. GTAIII was a different kind of revolution. Its list of accomplishments is endless, and far too easy to take for granted in our current day. Things like the in-game clock and the natural day/night cycle that happens before your eyes, or the intermittent weather patterns that actually affect how vehicles handle, especially on grassy areas, were profoundly immersive. The artificial intelligence of the citizens was impressive, letting them walk and drive around the city with realistic and dynamic concerns. They obeyed traffic rules, changed lanes, and reacted to obstacles like other pedestrians. They honked and complained to each other. Eventually they would get frustrated and try to squeeze around or ram into obstacles. If they hit a fellow non-player character (NPC) and committed a crime accidentally, the cops would actually chase them too. Firefighters, ambulances, and taxicabs operated logically and responded to things. You could steal any of these vehicles and participate in their jobs, earning side money. Previous GTA games had these elements, but much like how MGS iterated on its predecessor, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, it was more of a rebirth than a remake.

People didn’t know how to feel about MGS2 or GTAIII, but they were both major declarations from top-tier studios. In the case of GTAIII, it went so far beyond what was necessary that it stepped on the toes of other genres. Its driving systems, for example, were actually better than dedicated racing games. The variety of vehicles—from old clunkers, buses, vans, moving trucks and utility vehicles to sports cars—made improvisation during a getaway hilarious. The physics system meant you could easily end up on two wheels, drive off a bridge, land on the roof of the car, or roll down a steep incline and get even more busted up. Cars exploded when they got damaged enough which could set off a chain of devastation and chaos. The hoods and trunks of vehicles came loose and flapped around when damaged. Lamp posts, fire hydrants, and newspaper stands were destructible. The controls were sometimes clunky, such as when aiming guns or jumping over obstacles, and graphical quality severely dropped in many corners of the map, but the big vision was there. It proved something. Many people don’t even realize that major Hollywood talent was hired. Famous names like Michael Madsen, Frank Vincent, Joe Pantoliano, Michael Rapaport, Kyle MacLachlan, and others lent their voice talent, and some even returned for subsequent titles. It wasn’t known for its star power but it had it, and even gamers who were too young or unfamiliar with movies to appreciate the seismic shift that this talent represented were nonetheless happy with finally hearing people in video games who sounded like they were authentic and grounded. MGS had blown people away with its voice acting, but this game had bigger hired guns and used them to sell a bigger experience. MGS2 came by shortly afterward with no such celebrity appeal, but it continued to develop its own characters in a way that would upgrade its worthy talent into quasi-celebrities themselves, at least in the gaming world.

Something else connected these two games besides the timing, the console they shared, the impact they had, and, loosely, the setting: they both specialized in social commentary, particularly on American establishments and culture.

GTAIII took on the USA in a completely different way. Rather than lecturing players for hours about theoretical conspiracies and dystopian technology through weird characters occupying a wonky sci-fi military thriller, it used the city itself to speak volumes. The callous, crime-infested streets—complete with prostitutes that you can actually use for a fee if you pull up next to them and find somewhere secluded—shocked parents, legislators, and media alike. The vehicles you’ll almost always be driving have radio stations, and the commercials that play on them are hilarious over-the-top satire making fun of ridiculous business ventures. Places like AmmuNation, where the player can instantly acquire military-grade weapons for spare cash, are touted in bombastic commercials. Other radio personalities skewered their respective demographics. You’re dialed in the 90s, but you’re stuck in the ’80s, promotes Flashback 95.6 FM’s announcer between songs and commercials. Aeris running shoes, a parody of Nike, has a commercial that addresses criticism over its worker standards. They interview one of the employees, who sounds like a four-year-old with a lisp. They ask whether he enjoys it there. It’s fun; we get to play with knives! he responds happily. When asked about the teamwork at the factory, the child responds, My friend Joey sewed his hands together! Finally, what about the salary? Yesterday I made a dollar! The representative sees this as proof that everything is fine with the company. Their slogan? "Aeris running shoes. Always running . . . from something." That’s just a tiny sample of all the jabs taken at corporate America. Then there’s an entire talk-radio station where lunatics and losers can rant at the hapless host. One of them has an angry activist calling in to encourage thousands of people to come to a rally at the park, but with no clue what it’s about. He spouts vapid, meaningless slogans about patriotism, justice, and having had enough. The host keeps asking him what he’s fighting for, but the caller simply deflects by accusing him of neither supporting the cause nor being American enough. It’s a shining example of satire packed densely into a violent video game, of all places. Players had no problem parking their car somewhere in the city and listening to the music and commentary for minutes at a time. After investing hundreds of hours into the game, these radio stations only helped reinforce the world and create a sense of vibrancy and relevance.

It was the clear satirical power of the game that saved it from being dismissed as a glorified cop-killing simulator, even in the face of extremely heightened American patriotism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and a renewed support of American law enforcement and servicemen. Players who didn’t want to think about anything deeper were still won over by the funny banter and piercing observations, showing that America had a thick skin and an appetite for honesty. The commentary was an inescapable and organic part of the setting, not an intrusive and clumsy set of speeches. People appreciated that.

Hideo Kojima didn’t see any of this coming. He was laser-focused on his own secret mission, and wanted to pounce on the new generation of PlayStation hardware before the big Japanese rival companies could put out their offerings, and yet this relatively unknown studio from Scotland managed to dominate the sales charts both before and after his major release. GTAIII sold twice as much as MGS2 in this period of time and was universally celebrated as a brand-new vision for the future of video games. DMA Design was rebranded as Rockstar North, and the rest is history.

Doesn’t Mean Anything

When Hideo Kojima learned about GTAIII and its stellar success, he was confused and depressed. The whole concept was alien to him and other Japanese developers, who had thought of themselves as the leaders of the industry until then. It had practically no tutorial to speak of, and simply dropped players into a sea of choices and consequences with minimal introductions. Right off the start, players can make countless mistakes and get themselves lost or killed. Japanese players are famous for being reticent of open-world—and especially sandbox—style games, preferring a linear and gradual learning curve with plenty of exposition along the way. GTAIII was the opposite. It was a definitively Western game, in every sense of the word, and a giant middle finger to the old ways of doing things. To frame it in a negative light, you could say it was vulgar, exploitative, aimless, unstructured, poorly paced, confusing, annoying, janky, and lacking polish. These were problems Kojima thought he had overcome, and he hoped this would set him apart from the competition. The indirect rivalry between these two became a sort of struggle for the heart of Western console audiences, and it didn’t take long for GTAIII to become the clear winner from both a critical and sales perspective. Perhaps if he hadn’t used his golden opportunity to betray his audience and weird out the whole gaming community with his antics he could have come out on top. GTAIII had a silent protagonist with a swaggering walk, cargo pants, and a leather jacket, a Gen-X tribute to old-school cool, but reviewers had no idea what to do with Raiden, the androgynous rubber-clad brat who was chosen as Kojima’s new protagonist. All the polish in the world wouldn’t change that.

Instead of being heralded as the industry leader, he was left asking questions he wasn’t prepared for. Metal Gear was his meal ticket, but he had just scuttled it in dramatic fashion. And although he was getting major credit for the things he did right, nobody was appreciating what he thought mattered most. Once again, his hidden meanings were lost in the fray. Everybody assumed he was the one who was out of touch. With the depressing state of the world and the trauma of terrorism weighing on their hearts, people were moving on quickly from the strange Sons of Liberty. He wasted plenty of opportunities to explain his clever ideas over the course of his promotional interviews, and then sat back and watched as GTAIII went on to win game-of-the-year awards from the biggest gaming magazines of the time. It might have been easy to dismiss as a mindless rampage game, but it had real Hollywood actors, a coherent and epic storyline, and such clear cinematic inspirations that Kojima couldn’t miss them. It was a