After announcing the anime at Disney Plus' Originals Preview last year, Hideo Kojima revealed the first trailer for his upcoming Death Stranding Isolations show last week, based in the same universe as his hit Death Stranding video game series.
However, the news has made fans think back to when the developer rejected a pitch for a Metal Gear Solid anime over two decades earlier. "Metal Gear Solid is the neglected child," said one fan on Twitter, thinking of what could have been.
Back in 2021, Toonami co-founder Jason DeMarco took to Twitter and revealed he once tried to pitch an anime series to the Metal Gear Solid creator. "About a year after Metal Gear Solid came out, I met with Kojima and discussed the idea of making a Metal Gear anime. I talked about how much I loved the games and what the anime might be like," said DeMarco in a Tweet that has since been deleted, but was shared by ComicBook.
It sounds like Kojima didn't like the idea at all, as DeMarco said the developer responded by pointing at him and saying "Otaku" before breaking out into laughter. For reference, otaku is a Japanese word used to describe someone who is obsessed with a certain subject, often anime and manga. DeMarco added that the response made him laugh as well. But alas, the Metal Gear Solid anime never came to be.
Released in 1998, Metal Gear Solid follows former Special Forces operative Solid Snake as he is pulled out of retirement by the US government to go undercover and infiltrate a nuclear weapons facility that has been taken over by a rogue unit. Players must free the hostages and prevent the unit from using the compound armor weapon known as Metal Gear REX. Perhaps DeMarco was just ahead of its time, as the video game adaptation genre has gone through somewhat of a renaissance in the past few years, and there are most certainly grounds for a juicy story there.
Who knows, maybe Kojima will rethink his decision after Death Stranding Isolations hits streaming in 2027. The anime series focuses on a new story away from the video games, following a young man and woman as they set out on an adventure in search of human connection after a catastrophic event, as per the official synopsis.
For more, check out the other new anime coming your way next year.
