Hideo Kojima explains that there's a reason behind Metal Gear protagonist Solid Snake's cool, strong, and silent personality in the first game, but it was actually because of technical limitations rather than a creative decision.
As translated by Automaton, Metal Gear director Kojima recently wrote an essay for the An An magazine website to discuss voices and voice acting in games, in which he notes that when he entered the games industry in 1986, "games still couldn't speak. Characters did not have voices." Not only this, but Japanese "kanji fonts weren't supported," with katakana characters used instead.
There are three main writing systems in Japan – kanji, hiragana, and katakana – which are all used interchangeably for different purposes. Kanji is often used to write words like nouns and parts of verbs, while hiragana and katakana are phonetic symbols that represent syllables. Generally speaking, hiragana is commonly used for grammatical reasons, while katakana is used to spell out foreign loan words, amongst other things. Needless to say, you wouldn't normally see a whole script written solely in katakana, but this was the way things had to be.
"Solid Snake, the protagonist of my debut title Metal Gear (1987), was born as a silent 'tough guy' because of these circumstances," Kojima continues.
Kojima doesn't explain the technicalities of exactly why kanji characters weren't used, but as Automaton points out, memory constraints were likely an issue. There are tens of thousands of kanji characters in existence, although there are over 2,000 "core" ones you can expect to come across in more regular use. Either way, that's a lot to store. There's also a high likelihood that on lower-resolution screens like those of the MSX2 and NES, complex kanji characters would have been difficult to convey and, furthermore, read. Katakana symbols are much more simple, and therefore would show up clearer on a small screen.
Snake obviously didn't stay so quiet forever, however, with him getting an actual voice in Metal Gear Solid, allowing us to see him "delivering snappy lines reminiscent of 007 or Lupin the Third."
Be sure to check out our roundup of upcoming Hideo Kojima games to see what the director is working on now, including Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.
