Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 75: Behind the Scenes of Metal Gear (Live from PRGE 2017)

Episode Date: December 1, 2017

We've given you our semi-expert opinions on Metal Gear plenty of times over the years, so it's about time for all of you Retronauts listeners to hear some EXPERT ones. And who better to offer them than people who worked on the actual games? On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey and Jeremy Parish as they grill Camouflaj's Ryan Payton and James Howell about their work on Hideo Kojima's legendary series. Thanks again to everyone who made it out to PRGE! (We'll see you again next year.)

Hello everybody. Thank you for coming. It's Sunday morning and you should be in church but you came to worship us. And frankly, that's a better decision. So I want to talk a bit about today's panel. Today's panel is about behind the scenes of Metal Gear. I've done probably 15 panels by now and hundreds of podcasts. So you've heard enough of me.

So for this panel, I want to focus on two special guests who worked on Metal Gear games. They're here to join us. We're going to pick their brains metaphorically. And they're going to tell us what it was like to work on a very legendary series. So let me introduce everybody. I'm Bob Mackie, the host for this panel. Who's all the way at the end? Who are you and what do you do?

I'm Jeremy Parrish and I'm also the host Not for this panel Just for the podcast That's right, I can pull rank at any moment You are pretty rank, Bob Jeez, I showered, okay, who else? Oh, I'm Ryan, I'm Ryan Payton and yeah It's a pleasure to be here

I worked at Konami from 2005 to 2008 And then I left went to Microsoft And then I now help run a studio up in Seattle called Camouflage And yeah, and I work with this fine gentleman right here Hi, I'm James Howell. Yes, I'm a producer, Camouflage. I did a lot of contract work for Metal Gear games

and kind of media around Metal Gear and did a lot of critical writing about it, particularly on Metal Gear Solid 2. So, yeah, Ryan and James, they both work with a series, Ryan in a more intensive context, and they worked at a series at a very interesting time. It was moving to HD.

They were quote-unquote real Metal Gear games appearing on portable series. And I wanted to ask both of them, how did you find your way into Konami. How did that happen? What was that like? We can start with Ryan. Wow. Do you want the small, medium, or large version

of that story? Let's start with medium, and then I'll cut you off if it's too long. All right, fair enough. And apologies for anybody who's heard this story before, but I used to work as part of, as a freelance journalist at Zip Davis for 1up.com, which I know that Jeremy wrote for.

I think Bob you worked for them? Yeah, I did. I make that up. And also for like EGM, XBM, XBM, magazine. And I was a freelance writer based in Japan. I was actually working for the Jet Program, if anybody's familiar. I was teaching Japanese youths about all of our dirty Western culture. And I tried to explain English languages, English language rules that didn't even make sense to myself. So, but I was, you know, just trying to make ends meet.

I ended up, you know, pay my way to go to E3, 2005. And I was there to, I was really low on the totem pole to do freelance writing. So I was basically doing previews for like Okami on DS or Beautiful Joe on DS and all the other stuff that my ZIF colleagues did not want to check out. And one of my Zip colleagues, a guy named James Milkey, who was my boss at the time, he had called me. And I don't remember why I had a cell phone because I was living in Japan at the time. But I remember seeing him calling me and thinking, I'm on the show floor. He's probably going to go to ask me to check out, imagine babies or something like that. And I thought to myself, should I pick this phone up?

And I'm really glad I did because it changed my life. I picked up the phone and James Milki says, I double-booked interviews. I have Hideo-Kogima in one side of the building and I have Hiro-Nobo Sakaguchi on the other side of the building. And I think I'm going to go talk to Sakaguchi. I need you to go interview Hideo-Kajima. Okay, I'm like, okay, cool.

Like, when you want me to do that? Like, right now. He's like, run. All right, that's cool, because I just had finished. Meliger saw at 3. I was a little bit late to the party. I played it. I thought it was amazing.

and I was going to go, and I interviewed him for Metal Gear Solid 3 subsistence. I was actually joining the room with a couple other journalists, I think, like Terry from another publication, stuff like that. So anyway, over the course of the interview, you know, I asked some pretty pointed questions about Metal Gear Solid 3, and at the end of it, I didn't want to be like other journalists, and apologies if anybody's done this, if you've been on the journalist side, and you've asked for pictures with the creators that you're interviewing. Never do that. Or you ask for autographs. I don't think that's appropriate. and so I decided I wasn't going to do that

but I did want to talk to his translator as a guy named Akisaito I thought was incredible and so I ended up kind of befriending him after the panel or after the interview discussion and Hideo had gone out to go to the restroom on his way back myself and the translator actually speaking in Japanese and he says

what do you, so I knew you could understand what I was saying why do you speak Japanese and why do you do it in a southern accent and I said well because I'm living in Olsak at the time he says do you want to come in interview for a job Again, the long version of the story is the really interesting story, I think, about the interview process with Konami. But long story short, I end up getting a job and joining Konami in September, I think. August or September of 2005, right before Tokyo Game Show 2005, where they finally revealed like the real first footage of a Metal Gear Solid 4.

That's great. And James, you were a sort of Metal Gear scholar at one point, but then you found yourself working on one of the games. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, I kind of wound up a similar path of serendipity. Actually, well, okay, so I had written a big Killer 7 FAQ, and some friends and I decided to translate this kind of companion book for Killer 7, Yoshiko Hayashida and Jarrell Smith. And we liked working with each other, so we were like,

let's do something that's also current. So we decided to hop on to Hideo blog. I got an Angel Fire website. This was like 2004. uploaded files with the extension.txteo blog was Kojima's personal blog? Was it published by Konami? How did that work? Yeah, it was on Konami's website.

And it was kind of personal slash professional. I mean, it was public-facing, but also a lot of very personal, you know, ruminations. But yeah, so after doing that for about a month, about five entries in, I got an email from Ryan Payton International Manager saying, hey, we would like to test to see if there is an English market for this text. Would you mind if we used your translations as a test? And first thought was, I'm going to check the email header, and I'm going to see if this is real.

And it turned out it was, so then next step was emailing yes. After some back and forth making sure that it was going to be viable for an English audience and finding out that Konami wasn't interested in partnering directly with freelance translators. So I was like, all right, well, town to business. So I started a business, and we were able to get a contract with them. Yeah, and that was my in-road. After Hideo blog switched over to Hidey Chan Radio, which was the podcast, kept working with Ryan and Konami on a lot of sort of peripheral text,

a lot of TGS promotional stuff, some of the peripheral. referrals, pack-ins that came with Metal Gear, like the Metal Gear Saga DVD, and a lot of the timeline material that went out to press. And James, you were internet famous for a certain thing you wrote about Metal Gear Solid 2. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah. So in about, I think 2007, I've been trying to write something about Metal Gear for many years, but Metal Gear Solid 2 in particular, it was very hard to formulate exactly what the

sort of like core thesis was going to be. I just knew that there was something in Middle Gear Solid 2 that was kind of like, blow the top of your head off. Amazing. So after years of just like writing down isolated observations with no core idea to connect them, it just sort of hit me what, you know,

the way that the game sort of marries performance, player performance and the way that narrative unfolds. And it was a just a rush of like two weeks of just gathering like every piece of notes, every note that I'd written over like a past year and coordinating it. A lot of

late nights at a Waffle House, which is a 24-hour kind of burger joint in the southeast. And just putting it up on my personal website, wondering if anybody was going to read it, and it turned out some people did. So I want to talk to Orion about his work. I believe you entered late into the development of Metal Grosol of Three Subsistence. The re-release, it has a lot of extra modes, it has a free camera system. What did you do on that game? I'm just curious.

What can you tell the crowd about that? Yeah, not much, unfortunately. I did enough to get my name in the credits, which I thought was pretty cool. But, yeah, I joined Konami just as they were wrapping up subsistence to the development of that title. So I was doing what my job, what I was hired to do, which was kind of coordinating with the different departments within Konami, the U.S. branch, the European branch. Hey, can Hideo be interviewed for Eurogamer to do this? Or can you approve this packaging? Or here's some thoughts that I'm informing them what's going on with the game.

And that was basically my job for the first, you know, maybe six. the nine months of me working there. He's trying to coordinate with the different divisions. But portable ops was definitely your baby. I think it recently turned 10 years old this year. That sounds right. Yeah. So it's officially old, by our standards. And I'm curious because I

played it kind of late. I played it after Peace Walker and especially post-Metogers All of Five. It's interesting to see that so many mechanics that are core to the series now were introduced in portable ops. Can you talk about your plan for that game, your design for that game, what you wanted to do

with that game? Portable Ops is very close to my heart. I really feel like that game changed my life in a lot of ways. Portable Ops was basically kind of born out of failure, which was Metal Gear Solid, or sorry, was Metal Gear Acid 2?

Metal Gear Acid had this thing that Hideo would refer to as launch magic, which is basically, it was a game that was released around the time that the PSP was launched. It's got a big franchise IP slapped on top of it called Metal Gear. And people, when they go and buy their They think, hey, I can play Metal Gear on the Go, this sounds pretty awesome, and then buying Metal Gear Acid, which is not a bad game, but it's, as for those of you're familiar, it's a kind of a card-based strategy game, very different than what you'd expect from your typical Metal Gear Solid experience. And so the game ended up selling quite well. I think we now look back on the merits of that kind of, of the image of what people had in their minds, versus what was actually, you know, in the content. So it sold well enough to have a, to warrant a sequel, Metal Gear Asset 2, which sold very poorly. And basically, the press.

and the fans were all saying, give us a real Metal Gear solid game on the PSP. So that's what we end up doing with portable ops, which we had, I think, less than a year to develop that game from start to finish. And that game had some really original ideas in that

I think that some of them came from Hideo, some of them came from the producer of the game Okamura Sam, and they were looking at not necessarily Jagged Alliance, but very much like that kind of jagged alliance type of design. And the way it was described to me was really exciting, but I was pretty low in the totem pole at that time. However, about midway through the project, the team was going through, as most game

developments do, they went through a very difficult time where everything isn't working. Like the middle of development for games, I think, is extremely stressful, and they were really suffering from the doldrums of development cycle. And so how I contributed basically was, hey, the team has very low morale. Nobody likes what they're working on. All the resources are going on to Metal Gear Solid 4, which is the big project within the company. And here I am sitting there watching this all go down. And my friend, the audio director over at Kojima Productions, a guy named

Tojima, Sotado Tojima. And we were just crazy young guys, and we said, hey, you know, we're just going to play the build every night even though it sucks. And we're going to play it all the way until like two or three in the morning. And we're just going to write up a bunch of notes, send it off to the team. And then when they get in the office the next morning, they at least have some feedback, right?

And we just kept doing that every night. And I didn't really care what was going on because I knew the director was having some trouble. And eventually, I think I had to go to, on a business trip or something like that, and the notes didn't come in. And the producer of the game, Okamara, Sun, said, Ryan, I need you to continue to do that. And I thought that I was going to get in trouble. In fact, he was really excited about me doing that. So that was really my big break. I wasn't directing the game, but kind of giving them a lot of feedback that a director would. And then eventually the game came

out. It sold very well. It reviewed very well. At the kind of like the wrap-up party, I was sitting there with a bunch of the crew members from portable ops. He Dale comes by, I'm thinking, oh, I'm in trouble. He says, no, you're not in trouble. You actually are getting a promotion. I heard what you did on this project. I need you to do this on MGS4. That's awesome.

Can I ask a question about portable ops? So when I look back at Metal Gear Solid 3, the original version, Snake Eater, that took a lot of kind of a critical drubbing for being a little bit dated. You know, Metal Gear Solid was designed around it was before analog

sticks. And Metal Gear Solid 2 kind of continued that design. And then three came along and it still had the fixed camera. And then subsistence, the big thing about that was that it added free camera controls. But obviously you couldn't do that on PSP because they had the analog nut but not dual sticks. So was there

kind of a part of the challenge coming from the fact that in some ways it represented a step back from the direction Kojima productions had been going? I think that we knew that that was probably the largest limitation for the people. ESP, and I think at the time, this is right around the time that Monster Enter is starting to get popular, and the fabled claw kind of controls, right? So I think that we had this

thing where, I think, I don't know if Bob, if you played it this way, but you just had this, this, this, this kind of resetting of the camera every three seconds with like the left trigger or the left, what is it, the L trigger? And you just kind of got in that habit. So we, I don't think we spent much time just kind of contemplating it. That being said, I think that they actually had a better solution with Peacewalker. They ended up using the face buttons as like a second analog, which I don't know why we didn't do that on Portable Ops. Maybe it was just a lack of time because that was the theme throughout the whole entire time.

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Listen up. This is an extremely sensitive covert operation. You'll be one man against an entire squad of high-tech special ops. They will be armed and they will be dangerous. If you want to survive, you've got to have brains. You have to be in peak physical. condition. You have to have nerves of steel. The fate of the free world is in your hand, soldier. Failure is not an option. Sir, aren't these tests kind of easy? Suicide mission. Oh.

this quote life is like a box of chocolate uh Rita you're cutting out we need your answer life is like a box of chocolate oh sorry that's not what we were looking for on to caller number 10 bad network got you glitched out of luck switch to boost mobile super reliable super fast nationwide network and get four lines each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month plus get four free phones boost makes it easy to switch switching makes it easy to save so i want to get into Metal Gear Solid 4, Ryan, how long did you spend working on that game? What was your role, and when did you join the team?

Right, so I worked on Metal Gear Solid 4 from my first day at the company all the way to my last day at the company. And so it was, I started off in the kind of international coordinator type of role, not much influence on the game itself. And then over time, getting more and more influence to it. By the end of the project,

I was touching a lot of different aspects of the game, mostly related to controls, difficulty, balance, trying to collect feedback from other people and trying to make sure that that is getting to heat out and try to get approved to go into the game. Promotion, trailers, I've managed the opening movie, which was produced by Logan out in California, the Blu-ray, the making of.

I was just, plus the podcast, like I was all over the place and having a blast, right? I was living the dream. Yeah, so for lack of a better word, you were there to sort of westernize the game or make it more appealing to a Western audience. Like, what do people outside of Japan want from this game? Can you talk about anything you, and particularly you had to fight for,

things that you wanted in the game that couldn't make the cut? And before you continue, we have to make sure there are no Konami spies in this audience. Well, even if you are here, like, welcome. And you have no power over him. Yeah, you're not going to get me, because I'm really good about this, not saying what I shouldn't say. And most of the stuff I'm going to say, I think, has been either discussed publicly before. But also, I'm not here to shine a negative light on anybody.

This is a celebration of Belgrade. It really is. And as much as I think Konami has a very bad reputation at the moment, I'm actually very thankful to Konami, to Hideo, for the job that I was given. And I think that there's a lot to celebrate still. So, yeah, for me, though, in my role, it was less about the story. And so this is just a preemptive thing for anybody on Twitter who wants to continue to badger me about the Metal Gear Solid 4 story.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I actually didn't write it. That wasn't you? That wasn't me, unfortunately. You didn't single-handedly create this game? No, I'm confused. But you know how the internet works. But that's okay. If you want to vent your frustrations out of me, I can take it.

But I did have a hand in the voiceovers, obviously, for the English side of things. I did obviously go through the script and provide some feedback in terms of, hey, I don't know if this really makes sense. And that was more about what I was focused on. It wasn't about, hey, I like this or I like this. don't like this. It was more along the lines of, hey, let's look at the canon and make sure that we're not disrupting certain things. And also, so with the voiceover direction with Chris Zimmerman and that whole amazing cast and crew, I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles. I think I spent

it was something like 50 or 60 days voiceover recording, which is a lot. It was a huge voiceover project. And then when it came to the westernization of the game, a lot of it stand with from the controls. And I think a pivotal moment in the game's development was E3, 2006, I want to say, when Gears of War was revealed or playable at that show. Hideo, myself, Ken Imizumi,

we were invited to go play Gears of War at Microsoft's booth. We got to meet Cliff. It was a great time. And we had an amazing time with that game. We thought it was so fun, so fluid. We loved the way it controlled. And that was a big influence on the game because we knew that the,

that what Jeremy was talking about, the Metal Gear Solid 3 control is feeling very antiquated. We knew we had to make significant changes. If you actually look at Metal Gear Solid 5, I actually think that they took that even further in terms of the westernization of the controls. I think Metal Gear Solid 5's controls are far superior than what we are able to accomplish on 4. But my thing was really about trying to simplify the controls as best as possible. For anybody who's ever had to, in Metal Gear Solid 1 or 2 or 3, had to attach themselves to a corner and then in stealth

and then peer over and then shoot a guy I mean if you could do that you could basically master any skill I think in the history of humanity It's a sort of like cat's cradle you have to do with the controller Yeah You get into the CQC from Metal Gear Solid 3 with the analog sensitivity and everything

And that's really challenging It is, it is and I remember having a very specific debate with the team because they were presenting to me what they're thinking about for the controls And I remember telling them how Maybe somebody in the audience can remember this I remember this being news, was that before Halo 3 came out,

people didn't know what the X button did. It ended up being what the equipment was. Equipment was like the big feature for Halo 3. And I remember telling that to the team, guys, they've got a functioning game where they don't even need one of the buttons necessarily. And we don't have one of those. Like, we need every button,

and we need them like three times over. And so that was a big, I remember about being a huge debate within the studio. And thankfully, Hideo, entrusted me to really push forward to make sure that this game is more playable than maybe of the previous titles. So James, you did not spend nearly as much time as Ryan working on this game, but you have a very

interesting story with your brief time with Metal Gear Solid 4. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, prior to working directly on Metal Gear Solid 4, I've been kind of parallel, or outside of Metal Gear, working with PlayStation Magazine, PSM, during its final

Swan Song years, writing specifically about Metal Gear and doing a lot of work there. actually I remember this was parallel to the time my company was doing translation work for them

and there was this one segment they wanted to do like a Metal Gear timeline and show how the events of Metal Gear fit into the events of the real world which kind of fits the spirit of the series it tries to embed itself in real history and they sent me

some informational material like here is the Canon timeline for Metal Gear and I was looking at this and this was like material I had translated a year ago. So it wound up coming back to me as a freelance writer.

So I was doing all this and at the time I was in grad school I was just insanely busy. I was working on my MA, I was tutoring, I was freelance writing I was running a company doing freelance localization, some like some script editing for

for some of the VA work on what was it? Digital graphic novel? That's right. Metal Gear digital graphic novel. And I got this call at like 9 p.m. from Ryan. He was like, so how would you like to work on Metal Gear Solid 4? And he was explaining the circumstances, but I don't really remember

because I was looking for my passport. I could help me a little with that, if you don't mind. No, go for it. I'd be budding in. But, yeah, because I was starting to get a lot more responsibilities, One of the responsibilities that fell in me before was actually a lot of the localization of the text of the subtitles, right?

Which is something that only like a native speaker is really allowed to touch. And I had this huge task ahead of me, which was listening to all 60 days worth of voiceovers, making sure they aligned with the subtitles, which, you know, is a job I'm more than happy to do, but given where we were with the development, maybe a few months away from actually shipping the thing,

I just didn't have time. So I remember going to my boss, Ken, and asking, can I have a budget to bring out this guy that you don't know who lives in where at the time? Haddysburg, Mississippi. He lives in Mississippi you've never been to as part of this world. And I need, and I

will put him in a closet in Konami that he, that will be as far away from the studio as possible and like just put him in front of a TV and a monitor and we'll lock him in behind, what, five waves of security? Yeah, five levels of security through doors and two levels of security in the same room.

And as you can imagine. That's actually how I reviewed Metal Gear Solid for James, you were saying even the debug unit you were playing the game on had its own security measures. That sounded pretty funny. Yeah, yeah, there was kind of a red herring way of getting into the actual debug that looked like the obvious choice at the outset,

but actually wasn't. There was a completely different, completely counterintuitive way of actually accessing it. So it was like, are there nuclear codes on this? But I just love the image, and also the memory I have of seeing this guy James who clearly has a lot of love for the franchise and his big break is inside of Konami HQ

in this, really this room that's no bigger than a closet with a monitor and a desk and a dev kit and that's all you have for a week and you're looking at a black screen and firing back VO lines and making sure that the subtitles are aligned. Yeah, actually closet is a pretty good theme for my visit. I stayed in a salary man hostel which is basically about the size

of my workspace at Konami except horizontal and actually I think I actually slept in both of them as a matter of fact yes I can confirm that yeah I fell asleep in my terminal due to exhaustion not you know because I was sleeping on the job

Ryan but yeah so at this point kind of in the process of getting the script ready the Japanese script had gone to the translation house in TAC, I believe is the company that Konami Kojima Productions at least typically uses

and that gets returned it's in some ways kind of a technical sort of mechanical, non-styled translation in many cases it was run through an English editor, a guy Dave Chen who has done a lot of editing for a... Basically if you're a fan of Japanese

games like you've read Dave Chen's work and then it had gone to Chris Zimmerman and the VAs, and the actors and actresses had, they're in the headspace of the characters. They kind of know, well, this character wouldn't say, if this character felt X in motion, they wouldn't say it this way.

So they kind of made their amendments to it. Now, the script that was actually... David Hader in particular. Really? Yes, yes. He was, yeah, he's a writer, right? And famous for, you know, screenwriting from X-Men, watchmen, right?

And he's a doctor, too, isn't he? Maybe. I think with X-Men, he kind of came in and helped out. Oh, no, a script doctor. I think he was like a real doctor. I mean, he's a very talented individual, so. Came in and performed surgery. Yes, he actually sounds like a middle of your character.

Oh, that sounds particularly appropriate to him because, I mean, he cares a lot. Oh, he does. About the character. No, he does, and that's one of the reasons why I loved working with him. I was so impressed. You should tell the story about how you actually got to play the game early, whereas you probably weren't supposed to. Oh, yeah. So, oh, but, yeah, so the lines that were in the game were still the, you know, the localization house lines, which are, you know, three steps removed from what people are actually going to hear.

So it's going through making sure, listening to each line, making sure the script lined up, doing audio timing is a very, it seems like a very small thing, but when you have subtitles coming up in game and, you know, the garden's like, HQ, HQ. we have an intruder. You don't want to see HQ, HQ, we have an intruder the second they say HQ, because that's like information that's supposed to be revealed over a space of like four seconds. You know, that's pretty important game time, so timing those subtitles

was sort of parsing all that information. And at a certain point, I realized, you know, it would just be helpful to play the game and kind of know what this looks like. So Ryan had gone to the boot camp to run and manage that I was kind of there fending on my fending for myself for about

three days in a country I had no I didn't know the language in and I called like the one guy who spoke English Economy who was kind of my handler and I was like hey so can I play the game you know just like a demo build or whatever

and he was like so why do you need to play this game like I mean like as many levels of security, as you can imagine, that question was bound to come up. I was like, well, it's certainly going to help inform what I'm doing. It's going to make the final product better to kind of know what the context of this is. Hold on a second. Phone hangs up. Ryan calls me five minutes later, hey, did you ask to play the game? I was like, yeah, is that cool? He said, yeah, there's no problem with that. Hold on. Hang up. Five minutes later, handler calls. Okay, we're coming down.

so there was actually another human level of security but yeah they were very cautious and very concerned because obviously very sensitive stuff particularly at the time because I mean this was such a huge project big game for them and the Blu-ray I got the Blu-ray and it had a footprint on it weird and I mean I never followed up on that

but sounds passive aggressive to me well I mean that's just like an extra layer of security, kind of like fingerprint, face recognition. You have to dust it. Yeah, it's a special nanomachine footprint. So it's been almost 10 years

since Metalgrossil 4, and I think we'll do an episode on it next year to celebrate that. What are your reflections on the game before we move on to audience Q&A? It's been a decade, like I said, and the game's industry has changed so much, and what it did 10 years ago is no longer the new hotness. What do you think about it now? Let's start with Ryan.

Well, MetalGersault 4 is I think it's a really fascinating product. I think it tries to, I think it's a love letter to the fans for better for worse, right? I think it does a lot of things that we as the creators, or Hideo as the creator

but me as part of that production team that we want to do something that really excited the fans that we're going to put, this is supposed to be the final Metal Gear solid game, which I think people forget. And so we're trying to put everything in a nice bow tie or a bow at the end of it, right? And I think that that was, like, the intentions were

pure, but the execution and also the result of that was probably not what we expected, which was, it turns out that I don't think a lot of fans really do want to have all their questions answered, because it leaves them with nothing. And I remember feeling like this big void in the community after the relaunch of the game. And then I think it's also a really interesting game from a perspective of, here's kind of unfettered creativity. The game, we're just, James and I, as we're driving down from Seattle today, we're just talking about all the big things in the game, And there's a lot of big things, but they all are screaming at the same volume. And I don't want to list them out, but I'll just give you, like, a few, which are, like, private military companies.

You know, the United States occupation of Iraq, right? A reflection on Metal Gear Sold 1 and Shadow Moses, it's, you know, like a spy novel with Act 3 being in, like, the Prague or, like, Eastern European area. Like, there's just nanomachines and closing up all these different things. And what happened in MGS 3 with Eva and Snake? There's just so much going on that I think it's a miracle that we kind of, we were able to land that crazy ship, right? But then like kind of taking a step away from it, I think it's a very complex, complicated game that, again, I think is,

I think it's fascinating to look at, but I don't think it's as good as maybe Metal Gear Solid 3 is. I think that, I mean, kind of maybe a consequence of that, perhaps maybe not like in terms of intent. with Middle Gear Solid 4 in its final effect. Following up on the MGS2 essay, I actually wrote something about Metal Gear Solid 4 kind of doing a, I don't know,

a critical analysis in the same spirit. And the thing about Middle Gear Solid 4 is, as a fan who had just encyclopedic knowledge of so much of that series, I could see where everything was coming from. And the game actually kind of broadcast that. There were like these little scenes that were, you know, hey, this scene is kind of like this scene

from another game, press like the X button, and it gives you these little sort of like strobe light flashes. And it's like, it's almost like this game was about exactly how much baggage a series can accumulate over a series of like 10 years. And kind of like, you know, if you were a fictional character and you had to like bear responsibility for all of this, look how old you would be. Look how, you know, you would be throwing your back out. you were doing rolls away from guards behind a dumpster.

And so it wound up, I mean, even if it might not have succeeded in that end goal, it wound up accomplishing something fairly unique. And it used something that Metal Gear uniquely had, which is such a long history, such a just a treasure chest of details to throw out there. And it wove them together in a way that, managed to feel fresh, but also was sort of true to the spirit. Cool. So we've talked a lot about Metal Gear Solid 4.

I think Bobby are about to take Q&A, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to get any questions. So I did want to go back just a little bit to portable ops and kind of, you know, bring up the same question. Like, I don't know, I love portable gaming, but I feel like it really gets overlooked and sort of, you know, given sort of short shrift by most people. And so I'm kind of curious, like, where do you think portable ops stands and sort of

the evolution of video games. Like, what do you think that brought to the table and what influences it had? If any, I mean, maybe because it's a portable game, people were like, eh? No, I think it's a very important game in the franchise. It really definitely, as Bob alluded to it, really set up Peace Walker, which really set up

Metal Gear Solid 5. Like, the kernels of that game are found in portable ops and how people reacted to the game. The fans and, like, from the sales and the press, those mechanics of recruiting soldiers and putting them apart of your team, kind of like this Pokemon type of loop, was really addicting, really interesting.

Even in its rough form and portable ops, I think, really set the stage for what was, like, to become a really incredible playing video game, which I think is Metal Microsoft 5. So I think that's what its legacy is. But I think it's in this weirdly weird, awkward place when it comes to canon. I made the mistake of jumping online once

and, like, debating somebody, you know, about who was, like, claiming that. about who was, like, claiming that portable ops is canon. And I'm like, well, good for you. I remember specifically that it was supposed to be canon, but maybe it wasn't anymore. And it's just, I think the answer is it's very complicated. And I think that's where portable ops is kind of stands.

It's in that kind of awkward. It wasn't given the attention that Peace Walker was, right? It was a team of about 15 people that built that game. And it was, we were literally in the corner of the office, like working on this thing without much support. But I think its legacy really lives on, yeah, with these larger titles. cool so let's form an orderly line if you have any questions and then when you come up and ask your question i'll repeat it for the sake of the audience and our future listeners and then they can answer their questions so does anyone have any question just please line up and we'll take you one at a time yes so the question was about localizing the original metal gears one and two for the subsistence version of metal gear solid three well i'd hate to disappoint but i wasn't involved in the localization for Metal Gear 1 and 2 for the subsistence release,

so I actually can't really say what, I don't remember anything that we changed from it. So that's about as far as I could say. Again, I'm sorry, I don't have much information beyond that. So the question was, does Hideo Kojima focus on the theme or the mechanics when he's making a game? I think Hideo is a creator. Obviously, he's extremely talented, right?

And I think you can see from his work that he pulls from pretty much every single string that you can imagine. So it's not just, he's not one of those creators that it has to be about the theme, And if it doesn't fit within the theme, it doesn't fit with the game. Because if you look at the game, the games are, in a lot of good ways, kind of all over the place, a lot of ways. So its theme is a big thing, but also something that inspired him from a film,

also where he thinks of what the fans would like, pulling this reference from this other game. You know, it's basically everything kind of coming together as one. Thank you. So the question was about Ryan's involvement in Portable Ops Plus. Yeah, Portable Ops Plus was a result. That game was not supposed to exist. Portable Ops.

I actually gave that to you to sign the first time I met you, and you looked at it as if it shouldn't have existed. I'm sorry, and I felt really bad. One of my earliest memories of Ryan is him handing me a copy of Portable Ops Plus at Konami's HQ in Tokyo, TGM. I was trying to get rid of it. It's like the ring or something. Was that your copy of box?

I like the box art, especially the European box art's quite slick. But outside of the box art, I think the game really was, it was just trying to capitalize on the, surprise success of Portable Ops. So really no story, as you know, just a much of random missions. It was just one of these projects that nobody, unlike Portable Ops, which nobody wanted to touch

for bad reasons. I think people didn't want to touch the development of Portable Ops Plus for good reasons. Thank you. So the question was about in the development of Portable Ops Plus going with the fixed camera or going with the free camera, the discussion there.

Or just the normal ops in general. Yeah, just regular pops. Yeah, that's a, you know, I, I don't remember that conversation ever taking place. I think that you are right. That probably would have been a better choice, potentially. It's like, you know, using just like the one camera set or one stick set up for the camera controls.

But some of the code for portable ops, if I'm not speaking out of turn, was based on the snake eater code. And it might have been actually some of the substance code in there. So I have to think that they might be just inheriting some of the new 3D camera work, but I can't say for certain. Okay. So the question was which metal gear is most influential? Okay. As far as in your opinion, you know, for the... Yeah, I'll kick it off because I can be pretty short.

let everybody get to their answers. But for me, there's nothing better to Melagosol the three. I think that that's actually my favorite video game of all time. I think that that game does a great job of melding actually the theme and historical events and gameplay around with survival. They do a lot of survival

things that were really weird at the time, and people were laughing. I remember laughing when I read it in like EGM. You can like, you know, do these different incisions or you can craft these different things, which now I look at like survival games right now. It's just like a mainstay. I think that game was very forward-thinking. The art directions amazing. The score is amazing. It's my favorite

video game of all time. That's difficult because different parts of what I like about Metal Gear wind up showing at the different games. I think Metal Gear Solid 2, artistically, is kind of the peak of the series. I think both because of where it comes in terms of the history of games, what it accomplishes and how much it's influenced

so many games since, is really remarkable, particularly in the way that it takes what is really an intangible element, which is the player's memory of Metal Gear Solid 1. You know, to take something as intangible as memory and use it, as part of a game experience is really remarkable. As far as gameplay, Metal Gear Solid

3, it's just there's so much variety. You can cloak yourself in bees. Hornets, sorry. That's what I've always wanted. But then emotionally, like Metal Gear Solid 4, like the start of Shadow Moses, when you show up at the

station, a station, goodness, facility is a word, and it's just dilapidated, it's decaying, the best is yet to come starts playing. And it's like just this, it just prompts this elegiac reflection on the past, like, 10 years ever since, you know, you first entered that space in 3D, as you said. It's just, it's, again, one of those things that, something that only Middle Gear could do because it has that level of history and that level of persistence. Is you having a no, Hideo's favorite game? A Hideo's favorite game.

I think it actually might be Super Mario Brothers, if I'm not mistaken. Wow. Oh, in the Metal Gear series? I think he usually says MGS 1. Don't quote me on that, but I think that's, because I had to translate a bunch of his interviews. I'm pretty sure I had to translate that. Thank you.

The question was, does Kojima have a lot of hands-on control over the project? I think that goes, so his hands-onness, the escalation of it continues obviously as development carries on, right? And as you get deep in development, he's playing the game every day. And, but it's also good to remember that, at least for Metal Gear Sold 4, we had over 200 people working on the game, right? So it's, it's, you're definitely, it's a hard ship to land, right, in terms of like how much changes are happening throughout the day. But I do remember very distinctly of how I really enjoyed, like, for better for worse, getting the bug reports from him because he played the game and he was very particular. And one example I can think of is we were in a, one of the most serious.

meetings that we had had, which was basically talking about whether or not we were going to delay the game again. It was a very serious meeting. Thankfully, after that meeting, we decided we weren't going to, and so nothing was, there was no problem. But I remember Hideo coming in and whispering to the lead program at the time, Kordakato's son, and telling him that he had found a bug.

And, like, Quirotado was basically give him a look like, yeah, welcome to the party. Yeah. And he's like, no, I need you to come out here. And so 20 minutes later, Korda Kona comes back. and the people are like, what was the bug? And it's like, oh, it turns out that when you move in Act 4, when Snake's foot goes out to a metallic surface, it still sounds like a snow.

It still sounds like he's on snow. And that's actually just a problem with like collision and just setting it up. It's like a pretty typical bug. But that's the level of bugs that he was like giving and checking, which again, I think as you look at the game, he's very detail-oriented, which is cool. But yeah, those are the types of interactions that he was definitely picking up

That's great. Thank you. The question was about what was like to work with Kojima on a personal level. Yeah, I really liked working with him. And I'm proud of the way, and I've talked about this publicly before, I'm proud of the way that I approached him,

which was not, hey, I'm your biggest fan. Tell me what you need to do, and I'll do it. It was more like, hey, I'm here working to make the game as good as possible. just like you are. And sometimes our opinions will differ. And I'm always going to stand up for myself. And sometimes I'm going to say you're wrong. And sometimes you're going to say I'm wrong and, you know, may the best man win kind of thing. And I think that that actually resulted in a really good relationship towards the end where I was giving him my own crazy levels of notes and asking him to approve of those.

Because if he gave the thumbs up on any of those notes, I had permission to go around to the entire office and say, we're doing this, we're doing this, we're doing this. And so I think to his credit, he entrusted me, to do that. So I, and I will forever, like, really respect him for that and thank him for that. But as you can imagine, with a creator to his level, like, he's very particular about things, right? So you kind of have to pick your battles, I guess. It's probably the best way to put it. Thank you. The question was about difficulties in localization. Yeah, I mean, I have a million of those stories, but I think one, in particular, I was just talking to Chris Zimmerman Salter about this was that,

remember the time that David Hader refused to say a line in the game because he didn't think it was aligned with what Snake would say? and I thought that that was pretty awesome. But also very frustrating because I needed to bring that back home. And so I had to convince him, I said, hey man, just say the line. I know you don't agree with it, but I will go back, and I'll talk to you today about how we should change it for the next session,

but I need you to say the line so we can put it in the game at least for now. And please trust me. And that was one thing we had to do. And then the other thing was, I remember there was a big controversy in the studio about SOP, if anybody remembers that concept within MGS4. The Japanese team really wanted to call it soap.

and I think in the Japanese version they might have referred to it as soap but it's S-O-P it's SOP in English right and they came back and said why did you record it as Sop? It's supposed to be soap I'm like why are you arguing with me about English

that's a better question so we are out of time everybody thank you so much for coming please give James and Ryan Ratt applause they did all the work Call in to the night to dream Again in the light to breathe Waiting for a stone to rise

Build the isolation fleeting Call into the night to dream or not to be fighting here leaping with you leaving the box all behind calling to and caller number nine for one million dollars Rita complete this quote

Life is like a box of Uh Rita you're cutting out We need your answer Life is like a box of chocolate Oh sorry That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network, and get four lines,

each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town.

I guess from what I understand that will be totally. up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican Senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week.

Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choice, will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.