Hideo Kojima Wants To Be More Than The ‘Metal Gear Guy’

Of all the games legendary developer Hideo Kojima has worked on, the wildly popular Metal Gear franchise is by far the one that he’s known most for.

Even though a new Metal Gear game is in the works, Metal Gear: Ground Zeroes, Kojima said in an interview with EGM that he doesn’t want to be forever known as “the Metal Gear guy. That being said, the franchise offers plenty of benefits.

“I’m often misinterpreted,” Kojima told EGM. “I’ve always said that I want to work on original properties, but Metal Gear offers plenty of benefits. The Fox Engine, for example, took a lot of time and money [to create]; we were only able to develop it because it was intended for the next Metal Gear. In the next game, I’m introducing concepts intended for entirely new intellectual properties using the Metal Gear brand.

“I’ll admit that I hope my future endeavours are thought of as ‘works by Hideo Kojima’ rather than ‘from the creator of Metal Gear. I haven’t really shown the world what else I might be capable of yet. This may sound pretentious, but I don’t like being thought of as ‘the Metal Gear guy.’ There’s a lot more I can do.”

Metal Gear: Ground Zeroes is reportedly due out for a release around summer of 2013, which would put it right around the end of the current console cycle if all of the recent talk is to be believed. Metal Gear: Ground Zeroes will be the first game to take advantage of Kojima Productions’ FOX Engine, and it won’t be the last to use it.

Project Ogre, which Kojima has been teasing on Twitter for quite some time now, is also still believed to be in development.