The man behind Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima, has got Left 4 Dead fever, a first-person shooter addiction rare in the typical Japanese video game fan. "Maybe I should quit being Japanese," Kojima joked.
In a newly published Famitsu interview, by way of 1UP, the Kojima Productions head worries further about the disparity between Japanese and Western tastes, of which he's starting to fall more into the latter.
"The US and European marketplace are far better balanced," Kojima said in a one-on-one with Sega producer Toshihiro Nagoshi. "There are games everyone can play — maybe calling 'kids' games' would be inappropriate — but there's also a deep base of core titles made with movie-industry people that explore the depths of hi-def. I'm addicted to Left 4 Dead right now, but people say to me that that game would never work in Japan.
Kojima lamented that there "were hardly any Japanese games nominated in Spike TV's Video Game Awards this year."
"It's sad to see that Japan's games failed to even register in America last year," he said.
There's much more to the one-on-one than just Kojima's gaming tastes, including both his and Nagoshi's current slate of projects. They go unnamed, of course, but Kojima reveals that he has "started work on one" with three others "in progress."