Metal Gear Solid

Today, people view video games as childish nonsense, wasted technology that does nothing but hurt the minds of our children. But in the 1980s, one man thought to change that simple idea, showing that video games can be used as messengers for a larger purpose. In the Metal Gear Solid series, Hideo Kojima criticizes social, political, and cultural issues through video games by introducing today’s generation to fears of nuclear fallout and technological anxiety, the government control of information and data during the Information Age, and through the theory of intertwined fictional and actual history called Hyperreality.
Though he is a Japanese video game developer, Hideo Kojima gained all of his inspiration for the Metal Gear Solid series from American media. The characters, locations, and the plot were inspirations all brought in from the United States. He was inspired by American action movies, and wanted the main character of the Metal Gear franchise to be similar to these American icons.
“I asked him (a character developer) to make the character nimble and muscular, with the body like a Van Damme. I wanted it to be something like Christopher Walken. He has to perform espionage, so I wanted the character to be like a cat but still have a strong presence (Hideo Kojima).”
Right from the beginning, Kojima wanted to create a character that Americans could relate to, which is how Kojima began to shape the life like characters the Metal Gear Solid series (“Hideo Kojima”). Kojima makes it obvious in each of his titles that he wanted to not only take his original creation, Metal Gear for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and make it fun and accessible to players all over the world, but also use the game as a portal to show his opinions about issues in the world at the time. The biggest problem that Kojima wanted to confront was nuclear warheads and weapons building up in the United States and Russia years after the Cold War and not being properly disposed. Kojima