Metal Gear Solid is one of my favorite game series of all time. Its a series near and dear to me and millions of other’s hearts and so rich in interesting gameplay, narratives, characters and ideas that even the early ones remain relevant to this day, with my personal favorite, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, getting a full remake for the modern day next year!
So I’ve had Metal Gear on the brain recently, and that has led to a replay/rewatch of every mainline Metal Gear game (I say rewatch because 4 and Peace Walker aren’t available on modern consoles/PCs at the time of writing). And, as I’m sure those familiar with the series will recall, there is a massive… shift, to use generous terminology, with the jump from 3 to 4. What I mean by that is while 1 2 and 3 are pretty universally beloved and lauded as some of the best games of all time these days, 4, Peace Walker and 5, while I personally still love them, are a bit sloppier and more controversial within the discussion about this series. Discussion on these three titles ranges from all of them being misunderstood masterpieces that do more than carry the mantle of the originals, going so far to surpass it, to claiming that all three are unsalvageable dogshit that is undeserving of the name Metal Gear Solid. Regardless of what you think of these games, its hard to deny something changed during the time between MGS3 and MGS4. So what changed? Could it have been famous director Hideo Kojima’s heart just wasn’t in it anymore? Could it have been publisher meddling? Could it have been any number of simple, innocuous things that would’ve resulted in a shift away from the all-timer quality present in all 3 of the original Metal Gear Solid trilogy?
Of course not. This is Metal Gear Solid we’re talking about. Nothing is ever that simple. So, in the spirit of the series, we are going to conspiracy theory a bit. I want to talk about one man, the loose thread in the Metal Gear Solid story, the one piece that just doesn’t fit as nicely as I would like it to. I want to talk about…
Tomokazu Fukushima
Like any good conspiracy theory, we’re going to start at the conclusion and work backwards from there. Let’s assume that something drastic changed after the development of Metal Gear Solid 3/during the development of Metal Gear Solid 4. The main staff-related change that we can pinpoint is the departure and disappearance of one Tomokazu Fukushima. Little concrete is known about Fukushima. If you look up this guy’s name you’ll find nearly nothing of substance about him personally: no LinkedIn, no social media, no Wikipedia page, nothing. What you will find is a bunch of forum posts theorycrafting about how he was the secret genius behind the first 3 Metal Gear Solid titles, and if you dig even further into that you’ll eventually come to the conclusion we simply don’t know much about his role in any of the Metal Gear projects he’s credited on beyond some writing for the Codec dialogue, or you may come to the conclusion that Hideo Kojima hired Japan’s best hitmen to silence him before he could reveal the truth. While all the theorycrafting present seems like conjecture at best and ramblings of madmen at worst, there are some interesting points to make.
First of all, I’m going to cite a large and incredible NeoGAF thread from 2016 by user DevilFox pointing to the dissonance between some of the larger themes of previous games compared to those of MGS4 onwards, notably the themes of anti-Americanism and national identity taking much more of a back seat in later entries compared to their predecessors and this coincidentally happening right when Fukushima decided to jump ship from Kojipro and Konami. Kojima’s obsession with Hollywood also became very apparent around this time, and as a consequence, more high profile actors were brought in to replace long standing cast members within the series.
I’m not trying say that Kojima is some massive fraud that single-handedly ruined Metal Gear after MGS3, but what I am saying is that this sudden change in themes and directing style may indicate that some people in seemingly insignificant roles–people like Fukushima–might’ve had a bit more influence than previously inferred based on their credits. Fukushima in particular is fascinating because he’s credited with writing a lot of the codec dialogue for Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3. People tend to forget this, but a lot of what people love about the characters present in those games comes from the codec calls; entire characters are introduced and their ideologies fleshed out within the codec. Some characters we never even meet in person, and only communicate to us through the radio/codec. Fukushima likely had at least some substantial amount of influence on the story and direction of that game, and had Kojima’s ear when he was in the writing room. Its important to remember that Kojima is a Game Director first and foremost. While he does contribute a lot of writing for his games and is credited as one (The Written and Directed by Hideo Kojima meme lends to the perception that MGS is auteur work), that’s not all he does. Games aren’t created by one guy, no matter how much influence he has on development-games are created by teams of creative people, its just that we, as humans, have a tendency to pin mistakes and miracles on one face.
I usually don’t subscribe to the “lack of evidence of something=evidence for the other thing” theorem, but I would like to cite an interesting quote from an interview with Agness Kaku, who did localization and translation for the Western versions of Metal Gear Solid 2. In the interview, Kaku says the following: “Kojima’s stuff is…Fine, be a game creator, and know what you’re not very good at, and learn to work with people who are. Stanley Kubrick, famously, the one thing he could not do was write. He could do everything else, but he didn’t know how to write, so he worked with good writers, and worked with them in a very sort of relentless partnership. He knew his limits. I don’t think Kojima’s a writer. The fact that he would even be considered one shows how low the standards are in the game industry. Nothing in MGS2 is above a fanfic level. He wouldn’t last a morning in a network TV writers’ room, and those aren’t exactly turning out the Dark Tower series or The Wire.”
This “evidence” is anecdotal at best, but it does point to the belief that those surrounding Kojima during the development of Metal Gear Solid 1, 2 and 3 likely had played a larger role then is commonly believed during the writing of those games. Hideo Kojima and his team have a pretty big reputation for being scatterbrained and inconsistent with ideas these days, and contrasting Metal Gear Solid 4 onwards with the comparatively tighter and more focused themes of the previous games certainly makes for interesting conversation around Fukushima’s role in the development of those games.
That’s not to say there isn’t evidence to the contrary as well; Kojima made and still makes great games in both the pre and post Metal Gear ages, and 4 and 5 do have elements that I and many others absolutely adore. But that is to say there is some correlations leading to some believing Fukushima had his ear a bit more than commonly believed, and played a bigger role in why the original Metal Gear trilogy is so beloved than I think everyone gives him credit for. Kojima gets compared to George Lucas a lot these days, and while I personally think its a bit of a lazy comparison, its not without merit; both have a reputation for writing mountains of ultimately pointless lore than only weird nerds like me will care about, having scatterbrained ideas and not really knowing how real people talk. What we know George Lucas had during the making of the original, universally beloved Star Wars trilogy is a team of directors and writers who hung around him while George smoked weed and bounced his ridiculous but cool ideas off them, and this team knew how to make those ideas work and when to reign George in and say “we can’t do that”. And then George got free reign with the Prequels and we all saw how that turned out. So did Kojima have his own team during the development of the original trilogy, and was Fukushima his right hand man that made his dialogue work and helped make those games classics? Maybe. Maybe not. Its just so hard to know without more concrete information. If anyone reading this SOMEHOW has some information on the whereabouts or roles of Tomokazu Fukushima post-Metal Gear Solid, I would love for you to contact me.
Conclusion
So, was Tomokazu Fukushima the secret genius behind Metal Gear Solid and then was consequently murdered by the Yakuza to silence him and keep Kojima in power? Probably not, if for no other reason that saying yes would make me sound like a fucking lunatic. But was his role a bit more substantial than I think people give him credit for and was he a large part in what made the original Metal Gear games classics? That’s a bit more probable. According to Moby Games, he’s credited on 6 other games that aren’t Metal Gear related after his departure from Kojipro, those being Soul Sacrifice, Rain, Freedom Wars, The Tomorrow’s Children, Everybody’s Golf and Redemption Reavers, all of which seem to be smaller scale productions and all of them having the common thread of his role in development being ambiguous at best. But, if you want any evidence that he’s not dead, there it is. Its likely no one will ever know Fukushima and company’s true influence on the first 3 Metal Gear Solid games, and since Kojima seems to be doing fine for himself hanging out and smoking with Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelson and a bunch of other actors for the Death Stranding series, its unlikely some massive story will break about Kojima being some big fraud or at the very least having a lot more help than previously thought on his previous work will break anytime soon. The only person who knows for sure is Fukushima.
In a way, I think that’s kind of beautiful. Possibly helping a landmark series become landmarking and so influential in the first place and then just disappearing is a bit romantic, and surprisingly in line with the ending of the original Metal Gear Solid. Fukushima riding off into the sunset to live his life away from such a large project and the complications that came with it is probably a pretty good ending for him personally, and I’d hate to take that form him. So Godspeed, you mysterious bastard, and all the others like him that helped make those games. You’ll live on somewhere, in someone’s heart, maybe even the big man Kojima himself.
