Feature: Top 5 things the new Kojima Productions ad could be hyping

So you may have heard of Hideo Kojima’s latest mystery advertisement. In classic Kojima fashion, the father of Metal Gear has the internet abuzz with speculation over an ad that features little more than a rainy field with some lightning, a countdown timer, and the letters/numbers 5, E, and 3. Hmm…wonder what that could mean? As a personal stance against announcements of announcements of announcements of announcements (I think that’s right), we here at InsaneBear haven’t devoted any digital ink to this “story.” But that won’t stop us from poking fun at it.

5.) So anybody who’s been following this charade probably knows that Kojima Productions actually used the movie Grindhouse‘s flash site as a template for its own teaser site. Officially, they’re saying that there’s no connection and that it’s an accident that anybody knows this in the first place. But let’s take a deeper look at this for a second. Grindhouse is a double feature that consists of Death Proof and Planet Terror. Planet Terror has zombies in it. Zombies are having a quite a resurgence in video games lately, what with Left 4 Dead and Call of Duty: World at War‘s zombie mode and so on. Kojima has publicly stated that he wants to experiment with more western ideas. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Kojima will be announcing the video game version of Planet Terror five hours into E3.

Kojima's take on Left 4 Dead

4.) Mr. Kojima is generally associated with his Metal Gear franchise, but is also well know for four others. Four? Plus one? FIVE! That’s right, this new ad is hyping up Kojima’s next project, a super game that combines elements of Snatcher, Policenauts, Zone of the Enders, Boktai, and of course, Metal Gear. The player will assume the role of Solid Seed, aka Leo Ingram, a former detective turned mech gladiator who is investigating the curious behavior of his fellow combatants. The player goes on a quest to discover answers and soon finds out that his peers have actually been replaced by mysterious beings known only as “snatchers”, fabled bioroids spoken of in ancestral folklore. Once the intruders learn of his probing though, they murder his wife and he goes on a quest for vengeance in his bad-ass mech suit, which is powered by sun light. Unfortunately, the snatchers come from a perpetually dark moon not too far from the artificial world of the giant space station Leo calls home, so he must conserve his solar energy for when he really needs it and exercise stealth the rest of the time. The thrill-ride search for answers culminates in a shocking nano-machine conspiracy.

It's always the nano-machines!

3.) Maybe this ad isn’t hyping a game at all. Have you ever thought of that? No? Well, you should have! Because then you’d see it coming when Kojima ascends from the E3 show floor and takes his true form, Sheogorath, the Mad God of the Shivering Isles. All of the babbling non-sense, all of the joy he derives from psychologically torturing his fans, his god-like following, it all makes sense now! Granted, Hideo is considerably less Scottish than his video game counter-part, but those Super Mutants in Fallout 3 are way off from all the Super Mutants I’ve ever seen, so I’m willing to bet that Bethesda screwed up on their interpretation of the Daedric prince.

The Mad God will grace our realm.

2.) Perhaps we’re all looking into this ad a little too much. Flashing numbers and letters in the background? Snake’s face in the clouds? Multiple timers embedded in the source code? I think we’re missing the point. It’s a rainy field with rumbling thunder and the occasional strike of lightning. Seem mundane? Well, not when you’re playing the ultimate weather simulation video game! This will be Kojima-san’s major E3 announcement, and it will revolutionize gaming whilst creating an entirely new genre. It’s heavily influenced by popular Real Time Strategy games, and will feature two playable factions–the Humans and the forces of Mother Earth. The game expands upon the innovative environmental awareness of Boktai and pits the player against the awesome forces of the weather around them in a battle to predict and exploit weather patterns. Humans will plot geographic predictions and plan energy collecting structures around that information in the hope that wind farms, hydro-dams, and solar cities can satisfy society’s needs while withstanding the constant onslaught of erosion and natural disaster. As Mother Earth, the player will be able to strategically unleash storms of incredible power in the effort to destroy modern civilization and return humanity to their natural place in the planet’s equilibrium.

Play as the humans in their futile attempt to understand weather.

1.) But really, the most likely thing behind all this, and possibly the most hilarious (or painful, I’m not sure which yet), is nothing. No, not a Seinfeld-inspired game about nothing, just Hideo Kojima’s sick sense of humor that makes his fan-base into the tests subjects of inhumane social experiments. He just loves to toy with our expectations. Don’t believe me? Just look back to the ad campaigns for Metal Gear Solid 2. And you thought you were going to be playing as Snake…tsk, tsk, tsk. You should have known that Kojima would just put Snake’s skin over Raiden in all those trailers leading up to the game’s release. He got you good! Burn! Incineration! He is the insult master! Man…this is just getting depressing now.