The Smithsonian American Art Museum was jam packed for the launch of The Art of Video Games exhibit this past weekend. To kick off the exhibit, the museum launched GameFest consisting of games to play in the courtyard, panels, video game related movies, and some keynote talks for free! The two main talks of the weekend included Nolan Bushnell and Hideo Kojima.
Regarded as one of the most important and innovative video game designers and producers of our time, Hideo Kojima is most well known for the Metal Gear series and the cinematic movies found in the games. Curator of The Art of Video Games exhibit, Chris Melissinos, had the joy of hosting the talk where he asked a series of questions including those submitted by fans.
Kojima was excited to be at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and to be a part of not only the exhibit, but also GameFest. It was also interesting to note that during the talk Kojima mentioned that his earliest memories of video games was actually playing what was probably a fake version of Pong, which was discussed during the Nolan Bushnell talk the night before.
Growing up he jokes about originally wanting to be a Los Angeles highway police man like in the TV show “Chips” and later wanting to be a movie director (which explains the cinematic experiences in his games). Kojima ultimately created his own production company allowing him to control the direction and budget of the game so that he could “truly create something great”.
The whole talk came out to about an hour where Kojima discussed his current thoughts of video games as art (where previously in 2006 he refused that they were), the recurring themes surrounding his games, influences, the process of using video games as a means of story telling, and many other topics.
Unfortunately he was not able to go into any details about future projects, however Kojima did state that given this year marks the 25th anniversary of the Metal Gear Series, he believes this year and next year will be an important time and will become the shining point of his career. So while we don’t know any details, we can “use our imagination” and know that he is working on “something”.
Check out the talk with Hideo Kojima in full below and if you haven’t already, swing by the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the Art of Video Games exhibit.
