Death Stranding Creator Hideo Kojima Had to Go to the “LEGO” Way to Make Metal Gear Solid Maps

Metal Gear is long hailed as one of the most popular action-adventure gaming franchises, showcasing techno-thriller stealth gameplay. And there is no prize for guessing who was behind this famous series, which made this game so famous. Yes, none other than the famous video game designer Hideo Kojima. But do you know how he did that?

Kojima used a certain way of designing a map in one of the famous MG titles, the original Metal Gear Solid of 1998. And only this man can think of this unique way.

Hideo Kojima used Lego blocks to design the Metal Gear Solid map

Kojima revealed that he used graph paper to design both Metal Gear 1 and 2, as these two were in 2D. Metal Gear 1 also took a whole sheet of graph paper to set up the structure of the base and the entire island. But as Metal Gear Solid was in 3D settings, he used LEGO blocks to design the maps of the game. Kojima was actually constructing the entire Shadow Moses island from Lego to get an overview of MGS’s entire map for the whole development team.

Kojima also revealed that he used a 3CCD camera. This camera’s imaging system uses three separate charge-coupled devices (CCDs), each receiving filtered red, green, or blue color ranges.

But this isn’t the whole story. In this journey of building the MGS maps, Kojima eventually ran out of Lego pieces. He was about to postpone this innovative idea, but he soon got a bunch of Lego blocks on one of his birthdays from his own staff.

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Now, if you get to know about Kojima’s huge Lego collections, you will realize why he took the Lego way to make MGS maps. This fan is a true fanboy of Lego. From 10300 Back to the Future Time Machine to 21333 Vincent van Gough: The Starry Night, this fan has some major collections when it comes to Lego blocks. Not only that, but the highly popular 75331 The Razor Crest and 10323 Pac-Man Arcade have also joined that growing list. So, you see? The MGS map building had always been on the ‘blocks’ – er, sorry, cards!

It was fun to know that a huge gaming personality like Hideo Kojima, a Lego fanboy, used just Lego blocks to deliver the 3D design of the entire map of a popular title like Metal Gear Solid. At that time, 3D rendering software was not that advanced so as to be able to build a modern title like MGS. But that didn’t stop Kojima. Because it’s either no way or the ”Lego way.”

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