Hideo Kojima created and released Metal Gear in 1987, introducing Solid Snake to the world. He would go on to become one of the most widely recognised characters in gaming, but his first outing rendered him a silent, stalwart figure incapable of uttering a single word.
Kojima has gone on record explaining why Solid Snake was silent, breaking down his earliest experiences with voice actors and reflecting on past technologies.
‘Games Still Couldn’t Speak’
In a recent interview with An An (thanks to Automaton), Hideo Kojima explained at length why Solid Snake was a silent protagonist in the first Metal Gear game that debuted in the late eighties:
In 1986, when I entered the game industry, games still couldn’t speak. The characters didn’t have voices. There wasn’t even a kanji font, and the characters were just displayed one by one. Solid Snake, the protagonist of my debut game, Metal Gear (1987), was born as a silent tough guy because of this.
It didn’t take long for things to change, though. The legendary developer revealed that just one year after Metal Gear was released, a technological leap forward occurred when NEC released the CD-ROM2, a console with a disc drive. This was an evolution that accommodated Kojima’s desires:
Because the media was CD, it was possible to use voice dialogue, which had not been possible until then. I was one of the first to step forward and remake it.
It was my first time doing voice recordings. I did the casting myself, but since I was a complete outsider, I left the management to an agency. I took the first bullet train from Kobe and arrived at the studio in Tokyo. The gorgeous voice actors were already standing by in front of the microphone.
There was no time to greet or even have a meeting. It was an outrageous schedule, with everything recorded in almost half a day. There was no way I could build relationships. The regret and regret of this first experience would greatly change my subsequent voice recordings.
(Text translated from Japanese by AI)
From there, history started being made, and Kojima went on to explain how his various teams tried to innovate in the voice recording department whenever possible. Today, Kojima’s games feature Hollywood celebrities and deeply cinematic scripts and performances, so it’s fair to say he was successful in that mission.
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