As the Kojima/Konami fallout continues to grab headlines throughout the gaming world it’s inevitable that we’ll be inundated with unconfirmed reports and hearsay of what possibly transpired before what ultimately led to the cancellation of Silent Hills. Today’s case of Chinese whispers comes courtesy of gaming podcast The Codec.
Daley, the co-host of said podcast, claims that he was part of an interview with Rika Muranaka, Metal Gear Solid’s former composer who worked on the first three titles in the series. According to the alleged interview, (which we’ll currently chalk up as a rumor) Muranaka said that Kojima was paid a fixed wage rather than a percentage of the total game sales, and that, coupled with the massive budgets his works command, created a rift between Kojima-san and the higher-ups at Konami.
Given the fact that Kojima’s a notorious perfectionist it seems as though Konami had grown tired of subsidising the work beyond the initial budget agreement.
The relevant part of the podcast begins at 1:45:00 to around 2:03:00. Thankfully /r/MetalGearSolid on Reddit has cleaned up the transcription for your reading pleasure.
“The main reason for the falling out, at least in her opinion, is that Kojima gets paid a salary, and doesn’t make any profit share on the game. He gets paid a certain amount no matter what, and he was spending so much money and delaying the project, and adding all these features and making sure the game was the biggest and best thing it could be, and Konami was unhappy with that because [delaying] has no effect on him. He was spending the budget on this and that and upgrading the Fox Engine and then delaying further because the engine wasn’t ready, and Konami wasn’t happy with that because he gets his salary and he takes a more traditional "Japanese man" approach by not taking a profit share. So in doing that, he gets a little more than a game creator would but doesn’t take bonuses from the game selling well…
In her eyes, Kojima’s a fantastic creator, and probably the best creator of his time, but he doesn’t have a strong business sense like Konami would like him to have. Where instead of, for example, cutting corners by lowering foliage resolution, he wants to make sure everything looks as good and polished as possible. She said they paid for her to write 30-40 songs that ended up not being used, and he’d tell her to write another one, then another one, then another one, because he settles for what he likes and has a good mind for what people want to see and what people want to hear…
She’s worked directly with Kojima for the music before so she does have some insight, and personally believes that the music has suffered in MGSV because she’s not a part of it, because they couldn’t afford her. So instead of paying her to go to all these people and recruit them for the music, they chose to remove her from the equation and go to the people directly.”
While this is all very much in rumor territory it does seem quite plausible given Kojima-san’s penchant for perfection and publisher Konami’s financial state and shift towards the mobile market.
Still, whatever the reasons it’s sure to be a story that doesn’t go away in a hurry.
What’s your take on the whole Kojima-Konami debacle? Let us know in the comments section below.