MGS Documentaries Response
- Phoebe Yin
- Sep 22, 2019
- 2 min read
The two MGS documentaries are about 10 years apart and they provided me insight into the game studio’s real process of creating these legendary games. The first documentary about MGS2 mainly discusses the thinking process, ideas and methodologies in the beginning of the creation of the game, while the other focuses on the last 2 - 3 months prior to releasing MGS4. By observing the activities during these two drastically different yet important time period, I was able to find some interesting methods, problems and solutions surrounding the making of the MGS.
For the MGS2 documentary, I immediately noticed some of Kojima and his team’s early methods and inspirations are really similar to mine when it comes to making a project. First of all, Kojima got some of his inspiration from movies and real life. When he encountered ideas, he would draw them down on “the magic notebook”. I found it surprising and fascinating that though Kojima was preparing for such a huge project, he started simple and broad, with paper and a pen, just like what I do when I have ideas. During the making of the first scenes, Kojima and his crew actually flew to New York to do pre-production shots. I was impressed by this detail and this lets me know why some 3D video games have really realistic sceneries.
On the other hand, the documentary of MGS4 showed me that a central part of making a big project like this is realizing problems and solving them. One of the things that caught my attention was how Kojima demanded revisions towards the end of the development process and the lead programmer said that whenever you change something, bugs will appear, people make mistakes. Though the programmers of the studio must be elites in the industry, they still make mistakes, and it’s okay to make mistakes. Personally, whenever I code, it’s frustrating that some bugs cause the whole program to not function, but now I learned that It’s not about fearing the mistakes, but how to solve them and learn from them.
コメント