Rumor: Kojima Was Fired by Konami - News
by Jake Weston , posted on 09 April 2015 / 6,070 Views
The fallout caused by Hideo Kojima's departure from Konami continues. Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes voice actress Donna Burke has claimed that the long-tenured game designer was fired by Konami.
"Yes don't throw away the Kojima teams work over the last 5 years because upper management fired a genius," Burke stated via her Twitter account.
When asked to clarify whether this meant Kojima had been fired, Burke replied: "Yes but it's been out in the media for weeks... but it's true"
Burke's "Out in the media for weeks" statement assumedly refers to Kojima's highly publicized departure from Konami last month, but neither Kojima nor Konami had given any public statement as to the reason for Kojima's departure.
In response to Burke's Twitter statements, a Konami representative has stated that they are "categorically untrue."
Hideo Kojima had been an employee at Konami since 1986. Kojima's supposedly final game at Konami, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, will release September 1st, 2015.
Source: [@db_singer_actor via VideoGamer]
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No Kojima, no MGS. If he's out, I'm out.
awe you gonna cwy?
So here begins the collapse of metal gear solid...
Time to pull a Keiji Inafune. Make your own company and make something better than MG. The guy who started it can do it anyway. I wanna know what happened!
This has actually been updated on Neogaf with them saying they didnt fire him
It won't happen, but I wish capcom and konami would just be made first party publishers of one of the big 3... They seem to have lost their ways.
I agree, it's also a shame Sega aren't around due them having a good middle ground with devs in the 90s. Sony would likely try and get them to do mostly mature series and Nintendo likely younger ones. MS...well their history of buying developers is not good.
Kojima ran MGS into the ground anyway so no big loss.
Enough with the "Rumour" headlines. This isn't a rumour it's a public statement made by some who worked for Kojima. Therefore the headline is "Ground Zeroes VA claims Kojima was fired, Konami denies". A rumour is some nobody claiming their friend's uncle heard someone in a bar say that they know Kojima and Kojima said he was fired.
Nintendo will hire him. Told you Nintendo keeping friends with Japanese devs. was a smarter decision. Chasing the Western Dollar has been good for only a small minority of companies, especially long-term.
I won't even consider buying MGS without Kojima involved.
The problem with Kojima starting over with his own development studio is that he has placed so much of himself since 1986 into the Metal Gear universe. Has he done other works? Of course, but he will always be synonymous with MG and at this late stage in his career as a developer, he's not going to come up with something new that has the same lasting effect on the industry. It would explore similar, if not the same themes he's already covered in MG, making any such work a parody of his own former work at best, or something entirely different that is not likely to hold the same appeal to fans of his previous work.
That's why you don't try to try to catch lightning in a bottle, again. He can just go work on small projects that he enjoys and make some money. It doesn't need to become a blockbuster like MG is. Nor has to be recognized.
Part of the problem is not just his attachment to the Metal Gear franchise. It's also the fact that Konami keeps wanting him to make more of them. I guess he never found a true heir to the series in the same way that Shigeru Miyamoto passed on the Zelda series to Eiji Aonuma. It's unfortunate that his departure from Konami means that we'll most likely never get a western release/remake of Policenauts or a revival of SNATCHER.
