I woke up to some weird, if also not entirely unexpected news today: Hideo Kojima has a USB stick filled with game ideas, which he wants the staff of Kojima Productions to consult when he retires and/or dies.
"I gave a USB stick with all my ideas on it to my personal assistant, kind of like a will," he told Edge in a recent interview. "Perhaps they could continue to make things after I’m gone at Kojima Productions."
"This is a fear for me: what happens to Kojima Productions after I’m gone? I don’t want them to just manage our existing IP."
I find this news pretty interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, it's very on-brand for the man. Secondly, it's such a tease: Kojima is 61 years old, which isn't young, but given his apparent good health and the quality of Japan's medical system, it's entirely feasible he keeps working for a very long time, and won't be passing on for a very long time.
Will Kojima Productions even be around in 20-30 years time? Will any of his ideas be workable if the platforms and systems of that future are different to the ones we use today? Will anyone care who this guy was by then? Will we even be using USB? Who knows, there's a lot of uncertainty baked into this plan!
Which is why I've decided to share my own USB stick full of game ideas today. Having previously been scattered across various notepad files, post-it notes and Word docs, this morning I copied them all onto one of the last remaining USB sticks I had in the house, then copied them right back off into this blog.
The cons of this plan are as follows: I am not a professional game designer (though I have made a game!), don't own a games studio, and my CV isn't stacked with a succession of award-winning titles. The pros: you can read my pitches now, instead of waiting for me to die.
PITCH 1: Football
Football Manager is one of the most popular video game series on the planet. I love football and video games, but I rarely play Football Manager because the emphasis in the series is on tactics and formations and other whiteboardy numbers stuff. Boring! Being a football manager in the 21st century is actually all about internal politics and media mind games, and so I'd love to make a game where you take the role of a Jose Mourinho-esque manager and, instead of bothering with how many wide players you're going to start against Bournemouth, spend your time arguing with your captain behind closed doors, meeting a young Portuguese prospect's parents for a secret dinner and arguing with an FA official over social media. Something like Football Drama, but with the scope and systems of Crusader Kings.
PITCH 2: Tactics
As an appreciator of turn-based tactics games, particularly the bigger, broader ones, I've realised my favourite type of missions are never the finely-balanced ones, but those where one side is clearly more powerful than the other, and the challenge doesn't come from beating that evenly-matched opponent, but overrunning an inferior one within a certain set of circumstances, or holding out against a superior one until a certain threshold is met. I'd love to make a game where the asymmetry is the whole point: instead of just trying to beat your enemy, you have to juggle factors like military expenditure, casualties and popular opinion (or, as the other side, affect those as much as possible).
PITCH 3: Leadership
Another military game! One of my favourite pieces of television is the Band of Brothers episode “Crossroads”, in which our hero Winters is promoted out of his command of Easy Company, and focuses on his struggles with a new, hands-off role. The idea that his leadership is now reflected in decisions he makes off the battlefield--conversations with his soldiers, keeping up morale, ensuring everyone is supplied and looked after--almost instantly struck me as a very cool idea to build a game around. A strategy game where you do everything but fight the actual battles, and that realises there's a lot more that goes into an effective fighting unit than just moving them around and telling them where to shoot.
PITCH 4: Drivin' Around
There's an unwritten rule out there in games development that if you're making a third-person, open-world game set in an urban environment, then that game will feature illegal driving, murderous combat and police chases. I would like to make a game that features almost none of those, because my idea of an urban, exploratory adventure would be based less on Grand Theft Auto and more on...Dazed & Confused. You're a young person, you've got your first car and the only things you need to worry about are making friends, hanging out, romancing someone and driving around to get some food.
PITCH 5: Space
The four pitches above are all from the 21st century, when I was an adult and those ideas were working within some kind of realistic framework. But when I was a kid, my dream game was simple: I wanted a game set in space where you could do the flying bits of X-Wing, but also travel around the galaxy visiting various bases and cities (like Wing Commander: Privateer or Frontier), and at the same time be able to get out of your ship and walk around in a first-person view and do stuff. I realise some games have done this by now--No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous to name a few--but their scope is fairly limited, and the fact Star Citizen has tried to do something more in line with what I'm thinking, and is in the state it's in, says a lot about how, even today, the dreams of a 90's teenager are still surprisingly out of reach. I really thought we'd be there by now!
That's it, those are the contents of my USB stick that I will not say was full of game ideas, because they're all tiny document files and there are gigabytes left to spare. But it is at least a USB stick devoted entirely to some game pitches. I hope you enjoyed them, and if you would like to ever make any of them with me while I am still alive, please get in touch!
