Kojima and Sony

False alarm?

Not so very long ago there was something of a false alarm bell ringing across the industry as the ever trolling head of Kojima Productions, the man himself, decided to have a bit of fun with Twitter. He posted a picture of the Sony Games logo with a bunch of games behind it, totally without context, and just sat back as the denizens of his Twitter followers, well documented to pick apart an analyse anything he'll post from blurry pictures of legos to a list of western books he's currently reading, drove themselves wild coming to the, apparently obvious, conclusion. Clearly KP were preparing their audience for the announcement of the upcoming merger between Kojima Productions and Sony! How presumptuous to- oh wait. The actual tweet was of the PlayStation logo with a collection of PlayStation exclusive titles behind it, and Death Stranding stuck into the corner. Okay, I can see where the confusion is coming from.

Now to be fair, Death Stranding was a PlayStation exclusive title, but it came to PC later. And when I squint at some of the other titles behind this logo, sure most of them are from Sony owned studios (Sony is very cautious about sharing their toys) but there's a couple there that I either can't identify or don't appear to be exclusives at all. There's a sports game I can't exactly pinpoint because ya-know: sports games, am I right? And then there's a medieval looking game which I have no clue abo- oh wait, that's Demon Souls, isn't it? Yep, that's another exclusive from an exclusive studio. So pretty much Death Stranding, and maybe that sports game, are the only two pictures here not from a company in bed with Sony, conclusions were pretty inevitable to draw.

But Kojima is adamant, their studio is independent and will continue to be so for the future; although I have to wonder why that's even a point to belabour. I mean sure, Kojima Productions is independent today; but why are they independent? What is the reason for not signing up to the Sony wagon and becoming their exclusivity pumping machine? This is a genuine question, by the way, I'm not an expert on this particular facet of the industry, and my observations here can be only surface level. On one hand, independence allows Kojima Productions to have full control over what they make, although Kojima has claimed that Sony were hands-off during the development of Death Stranding anyway. The company would be pressured to make their games exclusive to PlayStation, but then Kojima tends to lean that way anyway, as he did with Death Stranding and has done with Metal Gear Solid titles whenever possible. And independence gives Kojima freedom of schedule; which is the only point I can't possibly refute, I suppose.

The relationship between Kojima and Sony reaches back far, to the point where their love affair has made identifying the distinction between them difficult. Who remembers back in Metal Gear Solid 4 (a game still exclusive only to PlayStation, which has not even been ported to PC yet) in which Snake uses a PlayStation controller in order to control an UMG drone? Or the scenes both in that game and MGS 1 where Psycho Mantis speaks specifically about PlayStation hardware and how he can manipulate it with his mind? (Which leads to some very cheesy, but iconic, fourth-wall breaking moments.) Death Stranding was even made with the express help of Sony studios, and was the headliner for their Direct showcase for a couple of years. All this time it's been hard not to see Kojima and his production studio as something of unpaid interns at their offices.

So what this incendiary tweet was likely referring to, if we use the ol' 'extrapolation' parts of our noggins', was probably some sort of upcoming collaboration between the two companies come the next PlayStation showcase, which of course means another round of watching the two lead acts of the romcom frolic around in the montage trying to pretend there's any legitimate 'will they won't they' in this paint-by-numbers script. Once there was a time where the prospect of these two powers joining up would have worried me, but since Sony has started to chill out on the whole 'porting to PC' thing I've lost my personal compunctions. By all means, let the Kojima heads into your web, Sony, I'm pretty sure the Venn diagram of active and excited Kojima fans and PlayStation owners are a circle at this point, the only weirdo outliers are people like me, so I say let the two elope and be done with it.

But of course, Kojima doesn't want to make that official step, because that would threaten to endanger that enigmatic anonymity that he enjoys so. I've never met the man, but from the distance of the internet, he feels like the type to not really appreciate having a boss. He'd rather be the mad scientist on the fringe of the industry, tinkering away on his little passion projects and playing the Wizard behind the TV screen when he wants to. There's a performance to the man that seems integral to his every choice and decision. I mean just look at the whole Bluebox thing with their game Abandoned. For months they were sized up as secret Kojima sleeper agents thanks to their difficulties with communicating to the Internet, and all it would have taken would be for Kojima to tweet out once that he was in no way involved with them, and that suspicion would have had a credible cradle to put the conspiracy to rest in.

I've played Devil's advocate before: 'he's known to lie to his audience here and there and thus his word would only inflame the issue', or 'he didn't want to draw more attention to the issue through addressing it himself and potentially cause more flaming Bluebox's way', but nothing I can conjure holds water. Whenever Kojima has lied he has done it in a comical and see-through way, such that it doesn't seem vindictive, but humorous in hindsight. (Except for the Raiden in MGS2 thing. That was cruel.) And as for drawing attention: this story was the talk of every game's journalist site for half a month, there's no signal boosting that any worse! Which says to me that he just loves the story, he loves the drama, and he won't sacrifice that for his smoke and mirrors stage presence. Even when a single statement could have done a world of good for a studio with terminal foot-in-mouth syndrome. 

Hideo Kojima is the phantom of the opera, a virtuoso recluse who wants the attention yet shuns the spotlight, at least until the stage is set to his exact specification. And there's just something so darn entertaining about a story with no straight answers, now isn't there? I love the show as much as the next fan, I'd be a fool to pretend otherwise; but in that same vein it can be oh so frustrating trying to pin down the man-who-refuses-to-be-categorised. Is he a loyalist or a loner? A showman or a no show? Yet at the end of the day does any of that even matter when he puts out great games? I suppose not. Unless Bluebox ends up getting themselves actually crucified with their genuine inability to convey a straight message; he could have really helped with that one.

Abandon All Hope

 Ye who buy into this nonsense

Time, work, and that all important, ever limited, creative passion has been sunk in droves towards bringing to life your greatest project yet, something which has taken years of off your life and turned the very heads of an entire industry of fans who have never even noticed your existence before. You blush under their new-found glare, embarrassed that after all this time the attention you've longed for has fallen your way. You don't know how to act. You should probably be humble, but who doesn't love it when you put on a little bit of a show? Tease the crowds a little, let them dream about a grander world and their imagination can do all the marketing you could wish for. Yes, just feed them snippets and it'll work wonders down the line! A little screenshot here, a little flirtatious tweet there. Oh, you know! You can tease the name of the game in question, because the title 'Abandoned' was just a placeholder anyway. That would go great along with the trailer of a camera wandering through the woods. Hmm, yes you'll tease 'First letter S, last letter L' what could possibly go- huh? Now everybody thinks you're Hideo Kojima and the game you're making is Silent Hill? Well crap.

If you're Hasan Kahraman from Dutch Studio Blue Box Games, I can only imagine your experience over the past year has been something like that. Burgeoning promise waylaid by being dragged into the imagination of the Internet over an illusionary ARG that everybody has fooled themselves into being a part of, your reward for wanting to play the marketing game with a hand close to your chest. I've touched on this situation briefly, and aside from the fact that Hideo Kojima himself still refuses to weigh in and put all of this to rest, (Maybe he just enjoys watching the torture from the sidelines) I've yet to see a single sliver of compelling evidence telling us that this Hasan man is Kojima or that Blue Box is secretly a fake company working on Silent Hill. I mean sure, Hideo Kojima did kind of do something similar with the whole 'Moby Dick Games' thing and 'The Phantom Pain', but people forget how obviously on-the-nose that was. Though we might not have know it was Kojima the whole time, it was clear that something was up the second the lead developer started doing interviews with a face entirely wrapped in bandages. 

But that hasn't stopped this crazy conspiracy from spreading. People have even turned to the almighty god-king of the internet, Google Translate, to see the irrefutable evidence that Kahraman translates directly into Hideo should you try it out! Of course, that could be because both names translate to 'hero', a rather common etymological route for names to come out of, but when you're in 'conspiracy mode' the logical explanation can fly out of the window a little bit. Maybe the only actual bit of this that had any traction, however, was the unique App experience which was launching before this Abandoned game and would hopefully clear up some misconceptions about what the game was. Upon learning of this, folk immediately starting asking how it was that an indie game studio could cook up an App-companion for a game that made it onto the Sony Store. And that's- actually a good question. That's by no means common, Sony is notoriously rough to indie studios, maybe they know something that we don't.

Of course, logical reasoning might say that this could easily be the results of some out-of-box marketing, but I think the conspiracy train has rolled far beyond such sensible conclusions at this point; it's conspiracy or death. And so this App became the beating heart, pushing past all the naysayers and fuelling every part of this nonsense, even becoming the central talking point of an entire subreddit dedicated to this perceived 'mystery'. Everything would immediately become clear upon looking at this App fully released, and all those that scoffed would feel silly when they realised how all of the wood-like imagery, ponderous shots and desolation matched up perfectly with the Silent Hill franchise. Blue Box themselves seemed very happy for attention to shift away from their legitimacy as a real games company, posting a teaser riling everybody up despite it featuring nothing but some floorboards and a man walking across them in a such a weird angle that you can see practically nothing of worth. But forget that, the launch of the App is here.

And so are the technical troubles, of course, isn't that just the way? You plan this out for months, grow a larger traction than you ever expected, and then technical difficulties come out of nowhere to kick you in the nether regions. It took some behind the scenes work, some apologetic tweets, but after a little bit of time, but eventually the App was back online with a small teaser introducing people to what the thing would hold in the months to come. And in that very moment the spell over the Internet was broken, although probably not in the way that Blue Box intended. For you see, the teaser I just mentioned, was exactly the Twitter video they had tweeted out just before, and the App itself had nothing else on it but placeholders for future content. Which is to say, this App had nothing of value to anyone, and I suppose people finally realised that not even Hideo Kojima would string people along that much.

It's actually quite astounding to see the tide of opinion shift so heavily over the course of a single night, as though all hopes were riding on some impossible reveal moment where the perfect Silent Hill game would materialise in front of you and all would be right with the world once again. Hideo Kojima and Konami, the two who left on such bad terms that Konami tried to literally scrub his name from the boxes of all their games, would just shake hands and partner-up like nothing had ever gone wrong. It was a pipe dream, and one which these theorists had fed themselves for months without any good reason to do so. Blue Box tried to insist that they had nothing to do with Kojima or Silent Hill, Hasan tried to convince the world that he was a real person, but people needed to have their highest hopes built up and knocked down like a jenga tower before the cold realisation could dawn on them. They had wasted their time.

It's almost with vindictive glee that the same parties who bought into this in the first place are now ripping into Blue Box's past to now tear it all apart. Previously those who wanted to point out how insane all of this was, would simply point towards the history of smaller scale Horror games that Blue Box had already debuted, pointing out that Hideo Kojima would have to have been cooking this twist-surprise up since one year after the initial Silent Hills reveal all those years back. Which would be surprising given that since then he'd been ejected from the company and created a whole new studio and IP. Now people have dug into the history of Blue Box as a developer and pointed out certain projects of thiers that have disappeared or been sold off, trying to paint this picture of Blue Box being an unreliable company with big promises and nothing to back it up. (Which certainly does seem to line up with evidence a little more, but I can't help but shake the bad taste in my mouth of people ganging up to punch down on an Indie Studio they themselves put on a pedestal.)

And so this, in the mind of me, ends the sage of Abandoned, because I think it's pretty clear that this isn't the grand Kojima prank which the world so desperately wanted it to be. I gave this topic a wide berth at first, not interested in the harassment of a small indie dev, but now we've gone through the length of the saga and they've benefitted from a boost to marketing that no-one could have predicted, I feel more comfortable summarising this wild journey. And for those that are still holding on, clinging to vague 'evidences' and pointing to the fact that images and shots of this game match up with the weird woods around Silent Hill in the lore, I posit thus; "Most horror games of the day look identical to one-another". And that's just a fact. I hope Blue Box aren't going to let this dying of momentum kill their game, and can salvage some of the lingering attention into a semi-successful marketing campaign, and that maybe Silent Hill fans will be able to fine themselves some contentment out of the chaos. Until the next stupidity to strike the gaming world, I guess.