In early April 2000, Matsuhana knew that E3 was only six weeks away. E3 was an important
-Mr. Matsuhana on the E3 2000 show
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milestone for the team, especially given that Metal Gear Solid's debut at E3 1997 put that game on the map. "Mr. Kojima knew that E3 2000 was the perfect time to debut the game to the public," Matsuhana recalls while sitting in a conference room at Konami. "It was, without question, very important that we had a trailer ready. But to be honest, every day leading up to the show I was worried we wouldn't have something ready to show."
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The first polygon demo of Snake jumping onboard the tanker. |
Kojima's idea was to debut Metal Gear Solid 2 with a nine-minute video trailer that would show scene after scene of action from the game's tanker sequence. Keen on making sure Raiden was kept a secret, Kojima personally started to record and edit the footage for the trailer, much of it taken from what the team calls a polygon demo, known to most North American gamers as an in-game cinematic or cutscene. By mid-April the entire team saw the first finished polygon demo, a short sequence that showed Solid Snake jumping off the George Washington Bridge and landing on the tanker. "As soon as I saw that polygon demo I said, 'Wow! This is going to be a great trailer.' We definitely had something special," remembers Shinkawa.
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The enemy AI plays an important part in the game…and the trailers. |
At least they hoped they were going to have something special--that is, if they could pull together nine minutes of great footage in time for the E3 deadline. "A game trailer like the one for MGS2 is very hard to put together," explains Matsuhana. "You have to rely on the AI to do certain things. A movie director can just tell an actor to walk in a certain direction, but a lot of our time was spent just shooting bullets in certain directions and hoping the enemies would react in a certain way." Time and again, Kojima would attempt to create breathtaking action scenes literally by chance encounters. "Eventually we realized it would actually be faster to go in and reprogram some of the enemy AI for the trailer so the soldiers would do exactly what we wanted them to do," admits Matsuhana.
As the trailer started to coalesce, the team in Japan informed Konami of America that it would be bringing a nine-minute trailer to E3. At first, the executives in America were worried that such a long trailer would overshadow the rest of the company's product lineup for 2000. "We said to Kojima, 'Wait a minute, our whole reel is only 30 minutes, and you want to take up a third of it?'" recalls Ken Ogasawara, the American localization producer on the project. Of course this reaction was knee-jerk and no one had any idea of how amazing the trailer would end up being when complete. In fact, no one outside of the development offices in Japan had seen anything related to Metal Gear Solid 2. "We hadn't seen a video, a screenshot, a logo, or anything on the game until a week before E3 last year," explains Jason Enos in Konami's US marketing department.
Part of the reason Kojima had been holding the game so close to his chest had to do with his fears about how it would be received by the public. "I know this will sound trite in retrospect, but honestly we had no idea what other companies were doing for the PS2," he recollects. "We weren't very confident about how we should present our visuals, especially since we put more focus on the environment and the effects than the number of polygons in the characters." Although Kojima was desperately trying to find out what his competitors were up to, he says that even weeks before E3 the team had no idea how their work compared to that of their contemporaries. "I was just so scared because I didn't know what the new Resident Evil or Final Fantasy or Tomb Raider games were going to look like."
Matsuhana goes as far as to say that the days leading up to E3 2000 were some of the darkest for the team--a complete low point in development. "I know people will read this and say, 'How could they not have been excited about the trailer?'" he admits. "But when we started to see screenshots leak out of competitors' products in the days leading up to E3, we became very worried that the public wouldn't like the direction we were taking the game."
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International Affairs Manager Scott Dolph made a mini-disc tape so Mr. Kojima could practice his English speech. |
But soon there would be no point in worrying--on May 8, Kojima boarded a flight from Narita Airport to Los Angeles with a nine-minute videotape firmly tucked into his suitcase. On the plane he spent time listening again and again to a minidisc tape made by Scott Dolph, the only English-speaking employee in Konami's Ebisu office. On the disc, Dolph recorded a short speech that Kojima was trying to learn in English. Two days later, he would give that speech in front of a packed audience and unveil Metal Gear Solid 2 to the world.
A Little More Sneaky, Please
Game of the Show
