There is still a lot of bitterness in the air whenever someone brings up Metal Gear Solid and Hideo Kojima in the same sentence. Gamers are angry, Guillermo del Toro is still angry, and it appears even some of the people still working at Konami are angry, because the latest non-Kojima made Metal Gear Survive may include a hidden message to the famed game director.
The tweet was posted by user Nourished Psyche, who makes an interesting observation about the names on a list that's shown in the early intro cinematic for Metal Gear Survive. After it shows your character in the casket you're told to give them a name. Once the name has been implemented, the character Goodluck will look over a list of other names on a clipboard. Your character's name will appear on the list along with a bunch of other names.
As pointed out in the image above, if you look through the list it appears as if there's a coded message with the first letters of the last names of the other characters' code names on the clipboard.
The image outlines that the surnames represent "KJP," which would stand for "Kojima Productions," and then going by the first letter of the other names below the player character's names it would be "F.O.R.E.V.E.R." just until you get down to Yota and Yuji. It appears again inside the staff manifest list in the game where you can see -- reading from the bottom to the top -- it repeats the same "KJP Forever."
Together, fans suspect that the designers working on Metal Gear Survive secretly tried to give props to Kojima and his longstanding work produced under the Konami label by saying that even after Konami dissolved the group, Kojima Productions is forever.
Obviously, this would have been something the developers implemented secretly, since Konami and Kojima's relationship did not end on good terms at all. In fact, Konami basically fired Kojima and had him sit out the remainder of his contract, even going so far as to have their lawyers bar Kojima from attending The Game Awards and receiving an award at for his work on Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, the last game that he made for the company.
Worse yet is that Konami shut down production on Metal Gear Solid V early, with an entire third of the game still left on the cutting room floor after the studio heads decided that the $80 million spent on the project was too much already, and weren't willing to spend the remaining $20 million to finish off the last chapter of the game. There are some gamers still intent on believing that Konami has hidden the third chapter of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain within the Nuclear Disarmament events, but most people recognize by now that it's not there.
This latest gesture from the developers in Metal Gear Survive could show that some of the remaining developers at Konami still respect what Kojima Productions accomplished over the years with the Metal Gear Solid franchise and are secretly paying respects to the directing legend, even though he had nothing to do with this most recent game. Alternatively, it could just be people looking too much into things, and it's just random names with random placements of letters.
