It's rare to see Hideo Kojima, creator of the Death Stranding, and its direct sequel. He's also known for his lengthy X (formerly Twitter) threads.

Usually, the subject of Kojima's social media rants is a review of a movie he saw, or his lunch at Kojima Productions, or a celebrity he scanned into Death Stranding 2. Occasionally, though, he also posts musings into his own work and creative process. Although threads like these have grown increasingly rare over the years, they once offered some of the most fascinating insights into how his mind works. They weren't all positive, either; from time to time, Kojima reevaluated his own creative decisions and found them lacking, including in one unearthed thread where he discussed Solid Snake himself.

Hideo Kojima “Regrets” Making Solid Snake A Clone

Bad For Continuity

In a series of three tweets originally posted in 2014 (here reproduced by Metal Gear Informer), Kojima itted that, if he could start the series over from the beginning, he wouldn't write Solid Snake as a clone of Big Boss. He says:

In [the] case of MGS, I always make this would be the last so I don’t really think ahead. If I thought ahead, I wouldn’t have made the main character be clone, the ending to be hard to continue.

In other words, Kojima always writes each of his games as if they're to be the last in the series; he never approaches them with expectations of a sequel. On the one hand, that's a good thing: it ensures that most of his games are complete as they are, and don't require sequels or DLC to tell the rest of their stories. On the other, when they do succeed and get tapped for sequels, it makes it that much harder to continue to escalate their stories.

To that end, Kojima says, if he'd known there was going to be a Metal Gear Solid 2 (and 3, and 4, and V, and Portable Ops, and Peace Walker), he never would've made Snake a clone. He likely also wouldn't have killed off Liquid Snake so early, since he proved to be a fan-favorite character later. He goes on to say that this kind of "postscripting" is especially difficult with MGS, because the series' tendency to jump forwards and backwards in time means he has to consider every decision's impact on both past and future events.

Looking back on it today, it's hard to imagine a Metal Gear where Snake isn't a clone. It's sort of become the crux of the whole series, with each successive entry leaning on a different part of the Boss' legacy and different groups' attempts to reinterpret it. But later in the series, Kojima started using an interesting storytelling strategy to walk back plot points he was uncertain about, and it would've been interesting to see how he might've applied it to Snake's potential backstory - but he never got the chance.

Kojima Never Got The Full Metal Gear Retcon He Wanted

Metal Gear Ended Abruptly

Now, these Tweets were posted in 2014, just over a year before Metal Gear Solid V was released. Say what you will about its story as a whole, but in its final chapters, it does something fascinating: MGSV recontextualizes every appearance of Big Boss that follows chronologically, revealing that the real Big Boss disappeared after Paz's death, and that Venom Snake, as he comes to be known, is actually a bystander who was transformed into a body double via plastic surgery and hypnosis.

It's an incredible last-minute reveal, and, while it's not the most universally beloved ending, it does a fine job of driving the game's themes home. It also shows an incredible willingness by Kojima to kill his darlings, as it were - to retcon plot points that don't serve the greater Metal Gear saga by coming up with wild, left-field twists that completely change the rest of the series. I shudder to think what he might've done with other story elements, including Snake's being a clone, had he been allowed to continue in that capacity, but, unfortunately, it never came to fruition.

This is because Kojima departed Konami, seemingly on pretty bad , almost immediately after the release of Metal Gear Solid V. Although the story has a happy ending, with Kojima establishing his own studio and making games entirely on his own , we probably missed out on a lot of Metal Gear as a result - not to mention Silent Hills, but that's a story for another time. So Kojima never really got the opportunity to retcon Snake's story the way he might've liked, and, with Metal Gear now firmly in Konami's hands, he likely never will.

Kojima May Try To Make Up For His Metal Gear Regrets In Other Ways

How DS2 & Physint Could Compensate

But although Hideo Kojima himself may never get to write another Metal Gear game again, he may compensate for his inability to retcon Snake's origins in his other works. We've already seen Luca Marinelli, an actor Kojima previously mentioned as his dream casting choice for Solid Snake in a hypothetical MGS movie, playing a Snake lookalike in Death Stranding 2. It's entirely possible that this character will be the version of Solid Snake Kojima would write if he had the chance to start again.

Kojima's planned Metal Gear successor, Physint, could also be an opportunity to explore untapped potential and mishandled plot devices from the Metal Gear series. Unfortunately, we know even less about that game than we do about Death Stranding 2 at this point, and Kojima's recent appearances suggest Physint is still several years away. It could be a long time until we find out what's going on there.

Still, the abrupt end of Metal Gear and Kojima's inability to wrap up or recontextualize Snake's story exactly how he wanted is more than a little disappointing. We'll likely never see another Kojima-directed Metal Gear game, but at the very least, we can take comfort in the fact that he's learned from his regrets in his later career.

Source: Metal Gear Informer