The 6 Clearest Examples of Creator Hideo Kojima’s Mental Illnesses in the Metal Gear Series

By Brian Hanson

Metal Gear Solid 4 has just invaded the dust-collecting PS3’s of fanboys everywhere, as an old and graying Solid Snake does battle against yet another round of bipedal, nuclear-capable tanks, bosses with deep-seated personal tragedies, and layers upon layers of intrigue, subterfuge, and long-winded conspiracy theories. Which seems as good a reason as any, really, to revisit Solid Snake’s escapades throughout the past 20 years of gaming, from his humble and somewhat clumsy 2D escapades on the Japan-only MSX computer and the NES, to his dad’s/boss’/genetic material donor’s most recent outings fighting communism on the PS2. One thing becomes apparent in playing these games again, though?if they truly are a transparent window into the soul of Metal Gear creator/director Hideo Kojima as they are purported to be, then that guy is one seriously fucked up dude. Plot spoilers abound, by the way, so if you’re a Metal Gear novitiate, you’d best steer clear. And you should buy that neat-o Metal Gear Solid Playstation boxset that can be had for only 40 bucks, while you’re at it.

6) Mild Learning Disabilities, Metal Gear (NES)

Solid Snake’s inaugural outing on Japan’s MSX home computer, later ported and brought overseas to the U.S. via the ubiquitous NES, laid out a surprising amount of the groundwork that would become the solid foundation of Metal Gear games to come (sans the requisite bleeding-edge 3-D graphics), including the impenetrable “Codec” system that was streamlined in later games but was like trying to decipher the Qur’an while under dialysis to a certain pre-pubescent internet columnist on the original Nintendo. As a straightforward 8-bit title emphasizing stealth and cunning instead of sheer firepower, it was certainly an anomaly in the era of Contra, and not just in the political sense. To say nothing of the dialog, which is the sort of thing that would get you a D minus and an awkward parent-teacher conference in fourth grade, possibly resulting in after-school tutoring or medication. As the years wore on, however, Hideo Kojima bravely rose against such English-language trials! Or perhaps he just hired a damn proofreader or a skilled translator or something. Either/or.

5) Childhood Trauma Related to Pants-Wetting, Metal Gear Solid (PSX) and Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2)

There are two periods of ones life when wetting your pants is perfectly appropriate and acceptable: really young and really old, when society doesn’t really expect you to be able to walk upright very well or speak coherently, much less remember to remove your pants before urinating. Between those years, the act of peeing oneself is an act of immense shame and sorrow, one that brings ultimate dishonor to your ancestors and turns you into the ultimate, never ending joke for your asshole in-laws and co-workers. Hideo Kojima must recognize that pain, and in his attempts to reconcile it he’s used it as a somewhat creepy method to introduce Hal “Otacon” Emmerich and his sister, Emma Emmerich, in the Metal Gear Solid games. See, they only wet themselves when they’re surrounded and about, to their knowledge, be killed brutally and mercilessly by big evil men in skin-tight suits! Still that doesn’t explain why such detail is given to the digitized urine, what with the steam-trails and all, and the fact that he’s all too eager it seems to leave the camera lingering on such a sight. So perhaps it speaks to a whole host of other, unspeakable issues. Well, perhaps not unspeakable, insomuch as in the same category as websites I take great pains to avoid showing up on my credit card statements, but whatever.

4) Disconcerting Homophobia, Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2) and Metal Gear Solid 3 (PS2)

There are, no doubt, people who might proclaim that the mere mention of homosexual characters in a big, blockbuster game series like Metal Gear are uniformly good things. I posit that theory is wrong, because Hideo Kojima’s gay characters include a 100-year old vampire-man with a crazy goatee who is nigh indestructible and carries on a relationship with the daughter of his deceased former bisexual lover, and a gruff, butch Russian sadist who indiscriminately grabs the crotch of his effeminate boy-toy and gets eerie thrills from sending large amounts of electric current from his own body (???) through those of his enemies. Oh, and he also has an untold, vast amount of material wealth accrued from a piece of microfilm passed down by the “Philosophers” that allows him to unleash a coup d’etat on the western world? Certainly not your garden-variety gay stereotypes, I suppose, so props to Kojima for not making gay villains that talk in lisps, have frosted tips, and aggressively hit on everything with a penis.

3) Sadomasochism, Metal Gear Solids 1-3 (PS2)

As a gun-toting video game hero, it is your duty to eliminate bosses with all due diligence and with extreme prejudice. This has been accentuated in recent years as the advances made in videogame technology have given video game bosses more realistic grunts, yells, and screams of pain and anguish. How odd, then, that the “Cyborg Ninja”?alias “Gray Fox” from the original NES Metal Gear?literally delights when Snake pummels him with his fists? Or remarks that he’s been “WAITING FOR THIS PAIN!!!”? Or consider the character of Fortune in MGS2, who yearns for someone to give her “death” in an unsettlingly stoic fashion? Or MGS3‘s aptly named boss, “The Pain,” who literally has bees in his mouth, and when he barks he shoots bees at you, and explodes in a giant cloud of bees while shouting his name after being killed?

2) Abuse / Incest, Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2)

The last half of Metal Gear Solid 2 can pretty much stand alone in the pale, dim pantheon of “Most Fucked Up Stuff Put Into a Videogame Ever,” but easily the most melodramatic and disturbing of these is the death scene of Emma Emmerich, Otacon’s half-sister, who, before finally succumbing to a fatal stab wound by a gay vampire, tells her smitten half-brother how much she hates him for being seduced by her mother and demonstrates this by telling him that the glasses she wears as a symbol for her complicated relationship with her estranged brother… ARE FAKE. It’s a scene that drips with bombast and drama, and the confused stares of adolescent gamers who bought a PS2 to play an awesome-looking game in order to shoot things, and not deal with bathos of any kind. Additionally, Raiden later tells his obnoxiously needy girlfriend via codec that he slaughtered hundreds of lives as a drugged-out child soldier, and stops just shy of singing a Linkin Park song.

1) Paranoid Schizophrenia, Every Metal Gear Game Ever

Now, without getting too political, it’s completely rational for normal, sensible people to feel that their government(s) is/are up to no good. We’ve all seen the news, the Frontline specials, the didactic documentaries, the Star Trek: Deep Space 9 episodes; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Millions and millions of seemingly reasonable people read The Da Vinci Code, and found it somewhat believable that crazy albino Catholics were guarding secrets about Jesus Christ’s various love-children. That’s one thing; Hideo Kojima’s well-chronicled tableau of government cover-ups, genetic experiments, and secret societies exist on some other planar existence of delusional, deranged paranoia. This is a series where a hand-selected group of a dozen individuals, who may or may not be deceased or immaterial or electronic (Metal Gear Solid 4 will, perhaps, clear all this up. Maybe.), literally control the lives of every living soul on earth; where the U.S. government takes cells from a one-eyed, cigar-chomping Cold War veteran and makes an entire army of clones out of him in the 1970s; where computer-controlled government entities, a la the classic film War Games, controls the mission of a former child soldier who invades a chemical treatment plant that is actually a front for a giant Metal Gear that controls digital information and also houses smaller, nuclear missile-equipped Metal Gears ready to turn the world into a crispy, brown nightmare. Now, we’re all cynical a bit of our government?no matter what end of the political spectrum we all fall upon, there’s no way they’re doing enough to appease everyone?but these are the kinds of things I’d expect from a mumbling, filth-encrusted transient scribbling things on the walls of an urban underpass at three in the morning.

Who knows? Maybe Metal Gear Solid 4‘s ending has all those conspiracies in place in order to publicly de-pants Solid Snake, or something. Hideo Kojima’s a nutty, weird guy.