'Metal Gear Solid' Creator Hideo Kojima Just Launched His Own Podcast, 'Brain Structure'

We've spent a lot of time over the years making fun of all things Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, but we do believe that the secret to making people laugh about the wackiness of Hideo Kojima's creations is to always be aware that this man's mind is never out of interesting things to show. Many will be happy to know that he has just launched his own podcast but they'll also be sad because watching a podcast requires time, so they'll hopefully go back to being happy by learning that we've summed up all of Kojima's most interesting insights below.

As soon as Kojima begins talking, an AI voice immediately interrupts the man to explain that it’ll dive into his brain. We hope it meant the mind of Hideo Kojima, otherwise, this podcast will have a shockingly short run. The AI then goes on to explain that the podcast will offer Kojima’s views not just on gaming but also on music, arts in general, and also current events. Too bad for the weirdly large slice of the gamer population who wants to “keep politics out of video games” because we're delighted to see what Kojima thinks of the absolutely normal and healthy state of the world right now.

Naturally, the first question is about how the Metal Gear series came to be. Kojima explains that his parents lived through the war and that he has always had problems with war games. Players are put in a war-torn world where nobody knows why they are shooting at each other. That doesn’t happen in the real world – or at least it didn't back in the day. Also, not all forms of warfare are about outgunning your opponent, so Kojima set out to create a game that gave context to the conflict in question, and one that allowed players to win that conflict in a different way.

Also, the MSX, the Japanese computer that the original Metal Gear was made for wasn't powerful enough to portray intense gunfights. Kojima goes on to explain that his previous attempt at making a game had been a disaster, so it was pretty hard to convince people to join the failed guy who wanted to make less action-y action games. Even a decade later, when making Metal Gear Solid for the PS1, people still didn't care for the idea of stealth in games. Kojima claims that what really got the ball running on the game was the directing and depth he gave to all the characters.

Kojima then talks about the origins of Solid Snake, the main character in the Metal Gear Solid series. Kojima picked that name because snakes are silent, and also because, well, he's obviously a fan of Snake Plissken from Escape From New York.

But as with all things Kojima, it just couldn't be that simple. Snakes are also wiggly and definitely not very hard creatures – something that his main character totally needed to be, so Kojima took inspiration from a song called Solid State Survivor to come up with the contradicting contrasting name.

Kojima goes on to explain that the first time he faced fan backlash wasn't because of highly contrived plot twists, but when the mostly silent Snake from the original MSX game became a talkative womanizer as soon as he arrived on the PS1. Turns out Kojima had always wanted him to be a Bond-like figure, but sexy voice acting in games just wasn't a thing before the CD-ROM era.

This new podcast is coming just weeks after Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of the Super Smash Bros series created his own youtube channel to share some awesome video game development advice, so here's hoping more legendary game developers hop on the train of spreading their mind-wealth with their fans.

Top Image: Kojima Productions