Metal Gear Solid director says video games will absorb movies and music

By Jeffrey Van Camp June 30, 2011

metal-gear-solid-4-solid-snake-old — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Hideo Kojima, best known for his role guiding the Metal Gear Solid series at Konami, doesn’t believe we’ll use the term ‘video game’ in the future. Instead, he argues, a new all-encompassing word will be created to replace it. Speaking with Nintendo Power (issue 268), the director predicted the demise of the word, reports Nintendo Everything.

“In this day and age, the video game business is a major entertainment industry that surpasses movies in terms of revenue,” said Kojima. “But when I started out, it was a completely different story. Back then, the game industry was a place for people with broken dreams to gather because they couldn’t land the jobs that they really wanted. Today, the industry has matured into a wonderful place where some of the most talented people in their field can take advantage of cutting-edge technology and world-class budgets to thrill and awe the entire world. In the near future I believe we’ll see the term ‘video game’ itself vanish as our industry evolves and eventually absorbs the movie and music industry to create a larger, all-encompassing form of digital entertainment.”

Leave it to Kojima, a man whose games have hour-long cut scenes, to predict the merging of games and other entertainment. While it’s possible that the term ‘video game’ will go away, the term has shown only resilience thus far, with many companies expanding its definition and scope by incorporating game-like elements into software and services that we would have never considered games 10 years ago, like FourSquare or Wii Fit.

But will the video game industry absorb the film and music industry? We’re not so sure about that one. While Metal Gear Solid games certainly feel like they’ve each absorbed several movies, there will probably be a distinction between the art forms for the foreseeable future.

Do you see a future where interactive entertainment (will that be the new name for video games?), movies, and music all combine into one giant, all-encompassing form of entertainment?

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Jeffrey Van Camp

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