This article from Gameblog.fr is a doozy. They spoke to various sources in the know about Kojima and Konami during MGSV's development. It touches on some things like how the concept of Survive originated in the development of MGSV as a zombie mode DLC (internally referred to as MGSV.5) and how Chapter 3 wouldn't have added anything meaningful to the story we ended up getting.
But what really caught my eye was some background on P.T
Obviously nothing is confirmed so take with a grain of salt. A quick TL;DR if you don't want to read the whole thing.
- P.T was developed in secret by a small team and a very limited number of people knew it was going to be released
- Important people at Konami who needed to know it existed did not know and first found out when it was announced at Gamescom 2014 alongside the public. This is apparantly the straw that broke the camel's back when it came to Kojima's relationship with Konami
- Kojima (who was Vice President of Konami at the time) worked with Sony to create a shell company in order to publish P.T on PSN while most employees at Konami knew nothing about this
- As a result, Konami PR found themselves having to answer questions from eager customers about a Silent Hills once the news came out that P.T was a playable teaser for a new SH game
- One of the main reasons Kojima was fired from Konami was because he used part of MGSV's budget to develop P.T
- Kojima didn't really have to report to people and his freedom within Konami at the time was a point of major tension between the two
- The heat between Kojima and Konami is gone now and communication between them has resumed, an avenue of collaboration between KojiPro and Konami is possible
I had to machine translate but if there's some French Era users in here that wanna translate parts, feel free.
There is a very good video that talks about P.T and its development, and how doubts about pursuing big AAA experiences really seeped into Konami and the higher ups when they started achieving success with mobile, namely with Dragon Collection. The mentality being that they're making money every day with this low-cost mobile game while Kojima asks for millions to develop a new game engine, a new MGS, open multiple studios on the west coast of the States etc... so P.T really must have exaceberated the situation.
The producer on Dragon Collection went on to become President of Konami a few months before MGSV released and it was around then that Konami started leaving AAA behind, with him stating that they would be doubling down on mobile so I do think some of these claims have some sort of weight behind them.
I'll be honest though, I really do find it hard to believe that he managed to keep the game this much of a secret. I know he was VP and all but you're seriously telling me they had no idea what he was working on.
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