It’s written in the clouds. Kojima Productions has started their pre-E3 teasing of their next game with mysterious URLs that lead nowhere, and an enigmatic magazine ad that is blatantly built to fuel all sorts of absurd fan speculation.
It’s that time of the month again when game companies start teasing their newest titles and fans really start putting that Zoom tool in Photoshop to good use. This time around we have Kojima Productions’ newest game, which the studio made some brief allusion to at Hideo Kojima’s GDC keynote but only started really teasing in the past couple days.
Yesterday 1UP received an email from a “Konami source” with a subject line of “T -3 days” and a URL attached (http://www.konami.jp/kojima_pro/next) that leads to a 404 error on Konami’s site. More interesting, though, is this advertisement printed in the pages of major Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu. It has a URL that corroborates the 1UP email, but a date (5/18/09) that’s three days after the one sent to 1UP.
More curious is the actual content of the ad, which is a shot of a grassy field underneath a stormy, cloud-filled sky. The most immediate things that come to (my) mind are grass-heavy and forest-filled memories of Metal Gear Solid 3, which would lead me to think that the game is another entry in the life of Big Boss. I’m probably wrong, though.
A closer look at the ad reveals a house on the right, two silhouettes of figures on the left (who could they be?), and of course, those amorphous gray clouds. If you look hard enough at them, you can see everything from a plane, Snake lying down, Hideo Kojima sitting on a duck, Charles Barkey’s right knee, and maybe even Raiden. Oh wait. The clouds do look stormy. Perhaps even filled with thunder and lightning? Let me check my Japanese-English dictionary. Yes. “Lightning” in Japanese is “Raiden.” This has got to be it.
Mystery solved.
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