JRPG Canon - Snatcher (1988, 1994)

But first, a little history.

Hideo Kojima joined Konami during their development of Lost World, an adventure game that was set on the Titanic, which was unceremoniously canceled after six months.

Konami wanted Kojima to make one of their super popular war games that everybody was making.

but he didn't want to do one just like everyone else so he looked for ways to subvert the genre such as making the hero a prisoner of war who has to escape and beat the game without using combat and after much back and forth of what was possible to do and what was appropriate to do he eventually arrived at making metal gear for the msx but i just

i just want to say you look at his credits on wikipedia and i guess he was working on lost world first but then like his credits go doing some on penguin adventure in 1986 to designing metal gear in 1987. the 80s were wild absolutely in the game industry

Yeah.

And because he was such a greenhorn on everything and hadn't much had barely shipped a game, much less had directed one.

He would tell the programmers, oh, hey, I want the audio to kick in right here and would like direct it like a movie.

And the programmers would be like, sure.

Okay.

And then just do it the way that they thought was better.

And he hated it.

He hated that he couldn't direct it while being the director.

So he decided that he was going to create his own scripting language to make adventure games so that he could actually control how everything was made.

And it is this scripting language that got us Snatcher and Policenauts.

Kojima teamed up with character designer Tomiharu Konoshita and gathered a small team that meshed well with Kojima's style and began making their video game like they would a movie.

During the 18-month development of Snatcher, Kojima again desired to subvert the adventure genre with things like breaking the fourth wall, extended scenes of non-interactivity, and a very cinematic style.

and also at one point in development kojima had the idea to write a secret message on the floppy disk that they used in the game kind of like how merrill's numbers on the back of the playstation box from middle gear solid uh but he wanted to write the number on the floppy disk in heat reactive ink so it would only reveal itself to you at disk change when you took out the hot disk it would have the secret password on it and uh

management so much and he's so stupid

yeah management uh yelled at him for how insanely more expensive it would be to do that like the reason you make games on floppy disks because they're cheap and this would completely make that not true so uh he they he had to cut that feature but ironically uh when he made the msx version he did some some weird cartridge stuff for it and it ended up making it uh more expensive than the pc88 version which is not how the msx usually went After the game was released, the players of the game loved it and they clamored for a console release.

But because the game was huge and complicated, they didn't even consider any consoles that were still using carts.

And they only looked at ones with CDs, which at the time was just the TurboGrafx and the Sega CD.

So he created Snatcher CD Romantic for the PC Engine CD that had expanded art, some voice acting, higher quality music, and a third act that provided a more solidified ending to the game.

Because the first game ended on a cliffhanger.

I think the third act is junk.