Resurfaced Metal Gear Solid interview shows how Kojima made Yoji Shinkawa's designs the game's beating heart: 'Hell yeah, a cyborg ninja!'

pcgamer.com:

While it was far from his first game as director, 1998's Metal Gear Solid is the title that established Hideo Kojima as one of the gaming greats. Pioneering in its cinematic approach, playfulness and outstanding imaginative parameters, the game marked a huge leap forward for 3D action generally, and single-handedly made stealth a genre that everyone from Sony to Ubisoft would try their hand at: None of the imitators, of course, got close to the Tactical Espionage Action that inspired them.

A contemporary interview about Metal Gear Solid from 1998 in the Japanese PlayStation magazine has now resurfaced, translated by Schmuplations and spotted by GR+, in which Kojima and series artist Yoji Shinkawa discuss the game's development, and the latter's influence over not just the game's aesthetics but the core design. Kojima recalls seeing Shinkawa's portfolio when assessing job candidates, and that «I’ve never seen anyone who I immediately wanted to give an S until Shinkawa» (Konami would internally grade submissions from C to A).

Kojima recalls the artist joining as they were wrapping up production on the original PC-9821 version of Policenauts, and reminisces about how picky Shinkawa was over the existing designs. «He complained about it up to the day before it went on sale,» laughs Kojima, adding that some of the suggestions would be incorporated in the later versions of the game on 3DO, PlayStation and Saturn.

Metal Gear Solid was already in the planning phase, and Kojima had a rough outline for the game but «had not decided on any of the finer details.» One of those rather important details was the mech at the centre of the game: The titular Metal Gear, which Kojima asked Shinkawa to design as a physical model. Shinkawa spent six weeks at home. «He was pretty locked up in his house there for awhile, so I’d call him occasionally, and dropped by a few times as a show of support,» recalls Kojima. «The floor of his room was littered with junk and scrap, it covered