While seventh anniversaries aren’t usually considered to be milestone moments, the seventh anniversary of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has been getting a lot of love today. In fact, it seems that MGS creator Hideo Kojima has been feeling especially nostalgic for his days with the famous stealth franchise he created and turned into an unlikely blockbuster series driven by considerable artistic ambition.
Throughout the day, Hideo Kojima has been tweeting and retweeting memories of the Metal Gear Solid franchise (specifically Phantom Pain). While that’s hardly unusual in the grand scheme of things, it is slightly unusual to see Kojima be this open about his MGS memories given both the circumstances of his departure from Konami and some current reports regarding the immediate future of the MGS franchise. This tweet, in particular, has been getting a lot of attention.
This obviously isn’t the first time Kojima has referenced the Metal Gear Solid series since his messy divorce from Konami in 2015. It’s not like he’s forbidden from discussing the franchise he helped create, and he hasn’t made the personal decision to simply never talk about the series again. In and of itself, Hideo Kojima talking about MGS is hardly news.
Yet, it is somewhat unusual to see Kojima be quite this open when it comes to expressing how much he misses the series. I certainly wouldn’t take the phrase “everything” to mean “I miss working at Konami,” but it’s interesting to see Kojima speak so openly about the idea that he misses a franchise that most people suspect he’ll probably never be able to return to. Again, it’s also at least a bit odd for Kojima to choose a game’s seventh anniversary of all occasions to suddenly get quite so nostalgic about it.
Actually, the real story here might just be the timing of Kojima’s fond remembrances. It just so happens that VGC and prominent gaming industry leaker AestheticGamer believe that Konami is getting ready to announce remasters of Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2, and Metal Gear Solid 3. While some of the details about those rumored remasters seem to be up in the air at the moment, there’s a lot more smoke around the fire of that particular rumor than there has ever been in the recent past.
That’s why some fans are wondering if these Kojima tweets are perhaps not just related to Phantom Pain‘s anniversary but whatever he may know about those MGS remasters that will reportedly be revealed in the very near future. Some are even wondering if Kojima may have recently had some input in (or direct knowledge of) those remasters.
So far as all that goes, the truth of the matter is that there is nothing out there at the moment that indicates Kojima had any substantial involvement with those rumored remasters beyond the fact that he…you know…made those games in the first place. Nobody would be surprised to learn that Kojima received some kind of official notification that those games are being remastered (if they are indeed being remastered), but I doubt Kojima’s relationship to those projects goes any further than the simple awareness of their existence.
As for whether or not Kojima will ever get the chance to work on the Metal Gear Solid franchise again, the most optimistic answer I can really give you is the eternally useful phrase, “Never say never.” Beyond the obvious problems between Konami and Kojima, some close to Kojima have previously stated that he never really intended for MGS to become a long-running franchise in the first place. Kojima has also previously expressed his desire to step out of the shadow of that franchise. You could argue that those statements represented Kojima’s greater frustrations with working for Konami towards the end of their relationship, but tweets like the one above are strangely about the closest we’ve come to hearing Kojima come out and say that he sits around thinking of returning to MGS in any capacity.
For the time being, this seems to be a case of a particularly passionate creator using the anniversary of the thing he created to share a few memories. Still, it’s bittersweet to see Kojima talk so lovingly about Metal Gear Solid, and it’s certainly worth noting that all of this is happening at a time when Konami might do the unthinkable and actually bother to release something related to the Metal Gear Solid franchise once more.