Controversy surrounds Metal Gear Solid Touch interview

Konami hits back at 'misleading interpretation' of developer quotes

No sooner had Metal Gear Solid Touch for iPhone been announced last week, than it was causing ructions.

Why? The root cause was an interview with Konami's MGS director Hideo Kojima and MGS Touch creative producer Yasuyo Watanabe in Japanese magazine Famitsu – subsequently translated into English by games website 1UP.

Numerous websites and blogs picked up on the story, including Pocket Gamer, but one paragraph of quotation from Watanabe provoked a reaction from publisher Konami, which supplied its own translation of the interview.

Here's the offending paragraph, as translated by 1UP:

"Regular game machines have directional pads and buttons that you assign functions to, but having nothing but a touch screen for control actually offers a lot of new things to try. We started with a game design and then had a lot of headaches trying to find a way to use the platform's unique functionality, but as a development platform, it's seemed pretty easy, the sort of thing that even a single person can make a game on."

And here's Konami's alternative translation:

"Well, for a normal game console, you have the direction key and buttons, and you apply which actions to which controls. but with this platform, you actually touch the screen and control it. There is so much possibilities. Therefore, there was a danger that we put in so much things and make the controls really too complicated. We had the game design first, but we were thinking how to utilize "that specific" spec of the platform, and this was the most difficult part. But, I thought that this platform is really easy to develop, and is easy for a person to create games by him/herself, even."

No headaches after all, it seems. If nothing else, the controversy shows how much interest there is in the west in how the first MGS game for iPhone is shaping up.

1UP's article was initially taken down, but is now back up with the original quotes still intact.

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