In an interview with Rocket Beans Gaming, Hideo Kojima indicated that he is interested in virtual reality but does not have enough free time to pursue development on a VR platform at the moment.
With Kojima’s upcoming PlayStation 4 game Death Stranding just around the corner, he’s been doing the press rounds in anticipation of its release. It was only a matter of time before someone asked him about VR, especially given his recent tweet featuring his own shiny new Valve Index.
Speaking through a translator around the 22 minute mark, Kojima answered the interviewer’s question on virtual reality – specifically, whether he had any experiences or ideas for PlayStation VR, or whether he encounters too much motion sickness when using VR to entertain the idea.
As soon as the interviewer utters the words ‘virtual reality’, you can hear Kojima express a cute little sound of excitement, even before the translator has even begun translating the question itself. His response (through the translator, which we have also edited grammatically for clarity) was as follows:
“Well I want to create something [where] you don’t get 3D motion sickness. But for VR, I’m really interested in it [but] I think I’m not free enough.
I said [on] the panel yesterday – in the 120 years that the [Lumiere] brothers created, we have a monitor or we have this square like [a] iPad or iPhone. We have a frame, right? VR [is] kind of freed from the limitation of this frame aspect. So I want to do it, definitely, but I don’t have really time right now to concentrate on VR.
Using the VR is probably maybe not [like a] game, more of an art or an education or simulator. I think it will be a breakthrough using VR. But in the next 5 years, I think streaming will be the biggest thing and if you’re streaming you cannot put framerates as much as you want, but in VR the framerate is really important. Right now, streaming cannot catch up to the VR aspect, so I think VR is a good time to develop.”
We’ve heard about this concept of ‘the frame’ from Kojima before, but this is the first time he’s expressed proper interest for developing on the platform, if he had available time to do so. While it’s unclear exactly what Kojima meant by “streaming”, he’s likely referring to upcoming streaming game services like Google Stadia. Nonetheless, maybe one day we’ll get a Kojima-developed VR title – we can only hope.
What kind of game or experience would you like to see Kojima develop for VR one day? Let us know below.
