Hideo Kojima and crew found it to be very challenging to include live-action historical material in Metal Gear Solid.
Kojima has shared some fresh information on the first Metal Gear Solid on Twitter. According to SiliconEra, Kojima acknowledged that including historical material in the stealth-action game was challenging, mostly because he lacked the relationships essential to facilitate simple licensing negotiations.
It turns out that Kojima contacted NHK, Japan’s state broadcaster, and asked for permission to incorporate live-action footage in Metal Gear Solid. Kojima now alleges that because he lacked the connections and know-how to obtain the footage, talks took far longer than he had anticipated.
Kojima has recently admitted that in addition to learning how to edit and incorporate the film into Metal Gear Solid, it took him a number of years to come to a licensing agreement with NHK. You may understand Kojima’s vow to never use historical material again in the wake of these incidents, but Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 have more live-action videos.
As SiliconEra points out, Kojima could have easily incorporated live-action video into Metal Gear Solid because the original PlayStation could play compressed movie files. Technically speaking, Kojima wasn’t being held back at all; access was the only issue.
It has been clear over the past year that licensing for historical videos can be a challenging process.
Due to license concerns with the usage of archival footage, Konami announced in late 2021 that Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 would be removed from digital retailers. The licensing of historical material continues to be an obvious ongoing problem, despite the publisher’s earlier this year announcement that it was working on getting both titles back on digital marketplaces.
The Metal Gear Solid trilogy has been thoroughly remastered, according to recent rumors, the latest in a long line of assertions that the series is getting a second chance.
