The video game industry has in Hideo Kojima a developer who always thinks of being one step ahead of his colleagues when it comes to innovation. The 58-year-old Japanese is known for creating Metal Gear Solid, which at the time revolutionized the market for the first Playstation. Now, he is thinking of taking the video game experience to another level, with titles that change in real-time.
The first in command of Kojima Productions, which belongs to Konami, explained in an interview with the Japanese lifestyle magazine An-An, quoted on sites such as Siliconera, Yahoo! News, and Kotaku, about the type of video games he wants to develop.
Kojima did not go into detail about what type of video games he intended to exploit his ideas for, but he made it clear that the game concept he desired to develop was augmented reality (AR) titles at a new level.
“What we want to make our games that change in real-time. Even when we finally have people of different ages and occupations from all over the world playing the same game, everyone, and we mean everyone, is playing the same thing… Instead, we want to make something that changes based on where a person lives or how they think.”
Hideo Kojima wants to take the AR genre to the next level
What Hideo Kojima aims to do is to take AR games to another level. Augmented reality video games already do what he intends in some ways.
The fundamentals of video games remain the same, but the locations of players have an impact. For Pokémon Go, for example, gamers must leave their homes to play physically.
However, the outcomes of these games do not rely on how players feel. Many games in the past have included in-game decision-making that had an impact on the storyline’s development, but they were usually capricious and still far removed from human thought complexity.
Kojima recalled in the interview another of his hits, Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand, developed for Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance in 2003. The vampire-hunting game cartridge features a light sensor that forced players to leave their homes.
“Because the amount of sunlight is applied in the game to defeat the vampires, the game changes depending on where you played and what time you played. Mechanics like that connect man-made systems and real life,” he explained.
Hideo Kojima admitted that he intended to add a sensor that would measure garlic breath to Boktai. If he thought of that for 2003, in 2021 he has infinite options to take augmented reality to the next level, even to the point of creating a video game that changes how players think.
