Alternate reality

Oct 14, 2009 17:21 GMT  ·  By

If there's one man in the videogame world who has the expertise to comment on the fact that Barack Obama, the president of the United States, got a Nobel Peace Prize last week, it's Hideo Kojima, the man behind the Metal Gear Solid saga.

Here's a full post on his blog addressing the issues. It reads “President Obama, who declared 'A World Without Nuclear Weapons' in Prague, has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Has the era at last started shifting? The start of the Peace Walker plan? I hope that comes to be. 'Peace will not walk to you'. 'You must both walk towards one another.' From the gym.”

Kojima is indisputably brilliant even if the videogame series he has fathered, Metal Gear, has a propensity to polarize the opinions of gamers. And the issues of how nukes, the threat of mutual destruction and militarism affect the lives of normal people can be seen as one of the main threads in the franchise, especially when it comes to the latest release, Guns of the Patriots.

It might not be too far fetched to see something like a black president of the USA talking about nuclear disarmament appear in either Rising, the new home gaming console Metal Gear coming from Konami or in a subsequent release.

Still, Rising is not the main concern for Hideo Kojima at the moment. While overseeing the development of that title, he is mainly focused on creating a full Metal Gear experience for the PlayStation Portable handheld in the form of Peace Walker, a game that again returns to the history of the franchise to portray Big Boss, as he tries to take out a military organization, which has occupied Costa Rica. The game is set to focus on the co-operative experience allowed by the PSP and will support the concurrent appearance of as many as four versions of the main character.