Hideo Kojima has revealed in an interview that he is still searching for a successor to take over the Metal Gear Solid franchise.
We know that Kojima has been talking about letting go of the franchise for a while now. Kojima has been saying that he does not want to be remembered as the Metal Gear guy, and is looking to make something different.
Kojima has brought up his age (almost 50), and his intent to move beyond games into movies and novels. It seems his future involvement in gaming would be in the realm of indies, or possibly more big budget games, but in a completely different direction.
However, Kojima is careful to find his successor. He says that handling the franchise can be difficult to deal with at times, and he needs someone who can keep Metal Gear going at a certain level of quality. Making comparisons to the Aliens and Terminator film franchises, he wants to make sure the next person will be successful, and not make future installments a mess.
To make a comparison, Shigeru Miyamoto has talked often about his efforts to train other developers to take over his franchises. We know he has given over control of Zelda to Eiji Aonuma, and similarly, several developers like Yoshiaki Koizumi and Hiroyuki Kimura have been entrusted with different incarnations of Mario games. Miyamoto has himself been freed up to work on his current pet IP, Pikmin, and is working on new IPs and games, including an unannounced new IP for the Wii U.
Perhaps Kojima has partly himself to blame for his current predicament, for not having continued to make adventure games beyond Snatcher and Policenauts. He did broaden his horizons in the early ‘00s with Boktai and Zone of the Enders, but criminally that did not last. But then again, given Metal Gear’s success, one could argue this is a problem you would want to have.
It would be great to see Kojima move on from Metal Gear and try something new, but we will have to wait on him to announce his successor before that happens.
