2015 was both a great year and a tragic one for gaming, and one of the most evident tragedies of the year was the firing of Hideo Kojima from Konami, merely the first step in the Japanese publisher’s Caligula-like slide into madness.
With Kojima’s departure from the company and with him forming his own version of Kojima Productions, he is at least able to continue creating games. Metal Gear Solid Franchise, however, remains with Konami due to its copyright.
Kenji Yano, a Japanese editor and reputed close friend of Kojima-san, has expressed his doubt of whether the franchise will have a future now that Kojima is no longer at the helm of the ship – an apt description considering that Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain had a massive amount of references to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
As a commercial product and as a physical thing, Metal Gear is definitely over. But in a way it isn’t. At the start of Moby-Dick, the narrator, Ishmael, states that Captain Ahab’s story is spun by (it’s a stage production put on by) the three Fates – Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis. Ishmael laments that they have made him the narrator, given him the ‘shabby part of a whaling voyage’ in order to have him tell Ahab’s story.
But at the end of the book, Melville gives Ishmael an extraordinary role to fulfill. After the rest of the crew of the Pequod have died, including Ahab himself, he has Ishmael say, … I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post…
Konami may yet have more plans for the Metal Gear series (they may even make it into a third pachinko game) but as far as the gaming world is concerned, the story of Metal Gear is both over and continuing, as the games that chronologically come after Phantom Pain (chronicling Solid Snake’s battles against the true Big Boss and Liquid Ocelot) will continue on until the time period of Metal Gear Solid 4.
