During a celebration of the Smithsonian's recently-opened "Art of Video Games" exhibit, we were granted the opportunity to talk with legendary videogame developer Hideo Kojima as he reflected on 25 years of Metal Gear while also looking ahead to the franchise's future. Read on to learn about Snake's evolution, multiplatform future, and potential death.

Kojima: To start, I’d like to tell you that we just arrived from Tokyo and yesterday was a really nice day, so we took a walk around town. Seeing the cherry blossoms in bloom is very nice. As you may know, it's been a hundred years ago today that these "sakura" trees, these cherry blossom trees were brought from Japan and given to Washington D.C. and the place they were taken from was actually close to my hometown, so being able to come and see these trees in full bloom is really something special to me.

Right now may not be the very best times for Japanese games in America, but someday I hope to see Japanese games, like those cherry blossoms trees, bloom. Maybe a hundred years from now, maybe not that long, but to see Japanese games really thrive here in America […] with the 25th anniversary of the Metal Gear series, I am willing to answer any questions regarding that and I look forward to hearing from you.

Hideo Kojima, alongside Sean Eyestone, a Producer at Kojima Productions and the translator for the interview.

OXM: One of the most artistic elements, some people would say, of the Metal Gear Solid series is the innovative boss battles that really have the player tackle the game in a much different way. What's the conception of one of those like at Kojima Productions? What, if any kind of boss battle, have been cut?

Kojima: In the beginning what we do when we think of bosses, we look at everything, from the world view of the game, as well as the story, as well as the gameplay, and just kind of hash out all these various ideas. So in the very beginning there is maybe about 20-30 ideas for boss characters. Then from that 20, we kind of whittle things down to see what is most technically feasible, what matches the gameplay the best, then we kind of hone things down and polish them. Then of course, you know, at that point we have some bosses that maybe don't match with the gameplay we want, so we kind of eliminate those and then pick up what's left and figure out what order we want to place them in within the game and then we have our flow for the boss battles. So if you look at the final game, you'll see 5-6 bosses in the game, but generally there are twice that amount that we are tossing around ideas about.

OXM: You've mentioned in previous interviews your attempts to kill Solid Snake within the franchise's narrative, is that something you're still attempting to do?

Kojima: Well first of all, with Metal Gear Solid 1, I made it a story about clones but I never intended to make a sequel to it at that time, that's why it kind of ended up being about clones. So once we started talking about clones and things like that, it became very hard to revisit and I felt like maybe it wasn't the best to continue with Solid Snake. From that standpoint, it's not that I don't like Snake — there are a lot of things I like about Solid Snake as a character, but just from a story-telling standpoint, I just felt the story would be much easier to tell and it would be a good way to end the story if Snake were to die. That's what I meant when I made that original statement and it became a big problem for me after I said that. With the "attacks" through Twitter and everywhere… [laughs]

OXM: Which character's evolution has impressed you the most over the course of the Metal Gear Solid series and which character's evolution has impressed you the least?

Kojima: As far as evolution, I really like Otacon. It's kind of funny, because he really doesn't do anything. So under normal circumstances, he's the type of character that wouldn't stand out at all. He's being dumped by girls. But as far as evolution as a character that has evolved with the hardware, that would kind of be Snake.

If you look at the original Metal Gear, he gives a very silent type of character, he didn't speak much and part of the reason for that was because on [the older] hardware we were unable to make the characters speak. So you could compare it to movies — so the original Metal Gear was silent-era movies and Metal Gear Solid 1 was when it became the talkies. At that same time though, at that point in time with Metal Gear Solid 1, he could speak, but there still wasn't emotion on the face, so everything had to be done through the voices. You can't just say whether or not he liked something or if he was feeling how or if he was hurt, everything had to be explained vocally.

In Metal Gear Solid 2, that was the next step in the evolution where we could now have emotion on his face and we did things like motion capture and tried to make things realistic and believable. In Metal Gear Solid 4, we were able to get even more resolution, so we could add more detail to the faces…we added things like wrinkles and the aspect of age to the equation, so you're telling a story through wrinkles. So if you really look at the evolution of Snake as a character, you're also looking at the evolution of the game industry and hardware and I think that is something that is pretty unique to Snake as a character and you don't see it in any other form of media where the character evolves with the medium. I'm not sure what the future holds for the next iteration.

OXM: Since the release of Metal Gear Solid, each of the games in the franchise have been created for specific platforms at first and then later you would bring out Subsistence or another sort of upgrade later on. Is that still the way you see developing Metal Gear Solid games or do you see simultaneous release on future consoles as a possibility?

Kojima: No, we don't [plan on doing it the old way]. As I’ve mentioned before when talking about the Fox Engine, it's not tied to specific platforms so we want to go multiplatform.