Hideo Kojima was ready to quit the "passive-aggressive resistance" Konami before he even made Metal Gear: "Do I have to start beating people up?"

gamesradar.com:

In a newly resurfaced 1999 interview with Hideo Kojima, he gives us the inside scoop about the early days of his time with Metal Gear developer Konami.

Posted online by Shmupulations, the interview, originally published by Nice Games, reveals a lot about Kojima's ambitions and the challenges he faced making Metal Gear. By the time Kojima joined, Konami was two years into making a war game that wasn't going anywhere. 

"That was how the project came to me," he explains. "What I was fixated on making, in the scope of a 'war' game, was an escape game. You know that old movie, The Great Escape? I thought it would be awesome to make a game built around a concept like that, of trying to escape from somewhere. But when I told the senior devs on the team about my idea, they were very dismissive: 'There’s no games like that.' I was still a new planner at Konami, so I guess no one was inclined to listen to what I had to say… there was just zero motivation from the start. It was like, what do I have to do here, do I have to start beating people up?"

Fortunately, it didn't come to blows. The situation did devolve into "passive-aggressive resistance," but an older employee took a shine to his ideas and the project "was finally able to start moving in a positive direction."

Kojima says the team still wasn't fully sold on his idea until they saw the iconic exclamation mark appear above an enemy's head when they were surprised in a working build of the game. "That sold them on the concept."

As everyone knows, he's a huge movie fan, even noting The Great Escape as an inspiration for Metal Gear, so why didn't he get into the film industry? "The film industry in Japan is very closed off, and no one will give you money to finance a movie," he says. "Even if you get hired by a studio like Toho, you won’t be permitted to direct anything for a while. I guess that’s to be expected, but I’m not the kind of person who can be content in a servile role like that."

After a stint writing fiction,