GameSpy: What do you think about DS?
Kojima: I think it is totally new, and I look forward to it. As a game creator, I look forward to working on it. And if it played music and allowed you to watch movies, that would be great.
GameSpy: Have you seen PS3 yet?
Kojima: I have not. I would love to develop for the PS3, but I have not seen it. I love to see things that other people have not seen.
GameSpy: Of the systems out there, which do you like best?
Kojima: I don't have a favorite. The thing is, I have been working on the PlayStation 2. I am very used to the system, the controls, the tools, and the development environment. Maybe I am too used to it.
The one thing I can say for sure is that the Xbox controller is too big.
GameSpy: Early on you said that PlayStation 2 was hard to work with.
Kojima: People on my team are masochistic. They enjoy the difficulty of working with PlayStation 2 and we assume that PlayStation 3 will be even more difficult. We know nothing about the system; but it's from Sony, so we assume so.
GameSpy: What will distinguish the next generation of games?
Kojima: I don't think there will be any big changes, unless, as I have often talked about, they come up with an odor sensor. They may come up with different I/Os [input/output] like the Eye-Toy, then we would see differences. But as long as they use a TV monitor and the same basic controllers that we use in your hand now, nothing is going to change.
Network capability is definitely a big element, but I don't think we will see anything as big as the transition from 2D to 3D. I think now that visuals have become so sophisticated, we have a great opportunity to spend our time making the games better internally in story, expression, things like that. The visuals and sound cannot become that much better than they are now.
For example, the life gage. … When that counts down to zero, your game ends and you have a choice whether to continue or exit the game. Maybe it's time we should rethink that thing and come up with something different.
There really was no giant leap from PlayStation 1 to PlayStation 2 except for better graphics and better sound. People talk about 'the Emotion engine,' but there wasn't that much to the Emotion engine.
Like I said before, in my mind, the biggest accomplishment of the PlayStation 2 is that it plays both video games and movies. I don't think the Japanese consumers understand how important that is, but I think Westerners might. Now that PlayStation 2 plays both games and films, it has told us that they are totally different things; and because they are different, developers need to pursue different paths. The path for video games must be highly interactive so that it is totally different than films.
Once the PlayStation 3 comes out, I think people will stop referring to games as being like films. I think it will be the other way around with movies that are like video games.
Games will need to change in the sense, and this is true not only in Japan but also in the West, when you think of games there is always this macho guy who carries around a weapon that he uses to blast everyone in sight. I think we will need to move beyond that. Hopefully, we will see more games that deal with the inside [issues] or deal with philosophy.
Edit: Either sp instead of of was a massive typo or I had a freudian slip. I'm talking about Billy Corgen on AIM... Fixed various typos too.
