Hideo Kojima, the head of Kojima Productions and director of the Metal Gear Solid games, has made a cameo appearance in the highly awaited AAA release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. He's a recruit that can help you out at Mother Base.
According to Gamestop, Kojima is an S-rank intel officer with an A+ rank in research and development. A very nice nod to his savvy overly complex stories filled with novel's worth of information and the fact that he's an actual game designer. Interesting that he ranks higher in intel than in R&D. This was spotted by Gamespot video producer Edmund Tran, who has been playing the game since its release and managed to get a glimpse of Kojima in the recruitment pool. You can check out the tweets with the images of Kojima below.
For those who don't know, you can use Mother Base in Metal Gear Solid V in the same way that you use a base of operations in XCOM. Your base is where you store all your equipment, weapons, vehicles, recruits and make developments and advances with technology and medicinal supplies.
Identical to XCOM, players can recruit various individuals with the coins they earn on missions in order to stockpile and grow the Diamond Dogs private army.
You can use the recruits to perform various tasks at the base, such as researching new ways to increase health supplies and medkits, or manufacture new weapon upgrades for your loadout. It's pretty cool and very meta – assuming you're into strategic micromanagement.
Mother Base also affords players the ability to deal with macromanagement when it comes to Mother Base – you can expand the base of operations and have everything operate on an automated basis. This means that once you put in new research, training or manufacturing facilities you can focus on the missions instead of dipping into intricacies and details associated with each facility.
As for recruiting Hideo Kojima in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain... you must first complete a few side-quests in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. He's one of the people you rescue in the game. If you complete the mission and successfully save him, The Phantom Pain will read your saved game and include him as a selectable recruit in the game.
It's likely that The Phantom Pain is riddled with all sorts of hidden Easter Eggs and it's likely that we'll see a ton of them pop up now that the game is out in the wild and the internet is waiting and willing to produce the results via social media at a moment's notice. If you want to experience the game for yourself, feel free to pick up a physical or digital copy for the Xbox, PlayStation or PC platforms.
