e spoke with Ryan Payton, director of Metal Gear Saga Vol. 1, about just how this juicy pre-order disc came to be, what will be on there, what kind of specs it has, and the possibility of a volume 2.

GI: First off, when I met you you were living in Japan freelancing and you were helping translate for the Microsoft Xbox 360 Summit. How the hell did you land a gig at Kojima Productions?

Ryan Payton: It’s a funny story. I was doing freelance at E3 last year and one of the writers for another magazine, and they asked, “Hey, do you want to come in and interview Mr. Kojima?” And I was like, “Of course. You don’t have to ask me. I’ll be there any time.” But the thing is I don’t like it when writers go in there and they slip the guy their resume. It’s like, you gotta do your own job and I think that’s kind of unprofessional. I don’t really like to talk about trying to get a job by trying to connect and network with them. You know, just treat it like a normal job. It’s my job to interview him. And after the interview I noticed that Aki Saito, who was translating for Mr. Kojima at TGS and E3, I was like, “Dude, you’re an awesome translator. You’re really cool.” And we started talking about what I was doing in Osaka at the time. And so Mr. Kojima sort of walks by us at the time, because I didn’t really talk to him after the interview, and he overhears me say that I was living in Osaka.

He was like, “You live in Osaka?” For people who know Mr. Kojima, he’s obsessed with the Osaka area of Japan. That’s where he kind of grew up and that’s where his Kojima team used to be - in the Osaka area. He speaks in the Osaka dialect too in meetings in Tokyo so people are kind of thrown off guard by it. So he starts speaking the Osaka accent to me, this dialect, and we start talking and he’s like, “Man, you’re cool. You’re from Osaka.” And so he slapped me on the back. So we just had a good conversation.

He was like, “What do you do? Are you looking for a job?” We started getting into the job talk. I said, “Possibly it would be fun to do a job interview with you guys or see if I can do any work for you guys or whatever.” That’s how the talk came to be.

So a couple weeks later I got a phone call saying, “Come on up. Let’s interview.” They’re looking for somebody to make the Metal Gear games more international than they already are. Make sure that the English is perfect. Make it more accessible to western users. So I interviewed and ended up getting the job. So I came in right before TGS last year.

Metal Gear Saga Vol. 1 director Ryan Payton

GI: How did the Metal Gear Saga project come about?

Payton: So I started with Kojima Productions about two weeks before TGS and they gave me a crash course for what was going on at TGS. They showed me the MGS 4 trailer beforehand and they’re like “It’s pretty cool?” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s awesome.” They said, “This is what else we have planed,” and they showed me a piece of paper. Ac!d 2 presentation, this and this, and then Metal Gear Saga. I was like, “What is that?” I didn’t know so I just started imagining what Metal Gear Saga was in my head. And it ended up being just a simple stage show with Mr. Kojima called Metal Gear Saga.

Basically what it was, was he talked for about an hour about the development of all the games with Mr. Shinkawa. But it was completely different from what I expected. I thought Metal Gear Saga was a game or DVD or something. And then I saw it and it was completely different. But that kind of stuck in my head. I was like, “You know, that would be kind of cool to have a DVD that goes over the whole Metal Gear saga or like a game or something.” So I presented this idea that, well with each game, if a game comes out, like let’s say if the game first comes out in Japan, we’ll try to give something special for U.S. users, like in Ac!d 2 we have the new cards, like the Game Informer card or the MGS4 cards. And we have the European extreme difficulty for the European version because the game was kind of late. So for Subsistence I was thinking, “Let’s put in Metal Gear Saga as a fourth disc.” He’s like, “Sounds like a pretty good idea. Why don’t you do it?”

So we started working towards it and having a fourth disc on Subsistence was just too crazy. Like packaging, it’s too big, too much trouble at retail. So it kind of became a pre-order item. So I showed him my concept for Saga. Instead of the development it goes into the story in chronological order starting with Snake Eater and going all the way up to the end of MGS2.

GI: I was surprised to hear that not only is North America getting the third Subsistence disc, but Saga as well. Usually these kinds of extras are exclusive to Japan.

Payton: What’s funny about Saga is that it’s so unique to America that our staff can’t even enjoy Saga because it’s all in English. I had to create a script for Mr. Kojima so that he could check over it. I had it translated into Japanese.

It’s really special. It’s basically like we have a fourth disc. The staff have all gotten to know me and I go out to lunch with them and they’re like, “Ryan, I heard you’re working on the Saga thing. It looks pretty cool. But I watched it and I don’t understand what it is.” And they’re like, “It’s cool. Hopefully, we can make a Japanese version sometime.”

GI: So right now it’s only coming out in North America?

Payton: It’s coming out in North America and it’s going to be included in the budget version of Snake Eater in Europe. So it’s going to be like a two disc set. And the second disc is going to be Saga. And we’re translating it into Spanish, French, German, Italian. So that’s what I’m working on now. Took a quick break for Gamers’ Day and now I’m going back to the office on Friday to go finish up the European version of Saga. So hopefully a Japanese version is next. That’ll be fun.

GI: So what are some of the specs of these movies? Are they going to be in 16:9? Are they going to be in HD?

Payton: Unfortunately, we’re not doing 5.1 surround sound. It was a question of time because with our sound team I think normal game studios would maybe put out a 5.1 just on the fly and just be happy with it. But for Kojima Productions, whenever we put out a trailer, like, let’s say Game Informer Online asked us, “Hey, could we get a digital beta of the MGS4 trailer?” And what we do, the whole team has to check over just like the copy of the digital beta. It’s like this rule that we have with the team. So doing it in 5.1, we wouldn’t have been on time for Subsistence. So we were like, “We’re going to do this DVD. Are we going to put it in stereo or are we going to do 5.1 and not get it in in time?” So we had to make some choices. I made this DVD in three weeks. It was really crazy. The whole concept started in mid-September, but the actual creation was in three weeks. It was every day, 14 hours a day. It was crazy.

But to tell you more about the DVD. It’s pretty cool. We have this kind of five star theme.  For each chapter it’s five stars. So when you put the DVD in your DVD player, it’s not [just] a PS2 DVD by the way, it’s a regular DVD, region free, and you see the intro and it goes to the DVD menu. And the DVD menu looks a lot like the poster. Each chapter is one of the stars so you can move your mouse or whatever you’re using to select what chapter you want to see over and over again. So the first star is chapter one and so on. Also we have an “extra menu.” This menu brings you to the library of trailers. It’s got all seven trailers that Kojima Productions has done so far.

GI: So it’s all the trailers for Metal Gear Solid 3?

Payton: It’s got three Subsistence trailers, two Ac!d trailers, and two Metal Gear Solid 4 trailers. You know, the E3 one that didn’t show the PS3 graphics? The joke one? That one hasn’t been available on a whole lot of websites. We kept it on the Kojima Productions website only. So finally you can see it on DVD in high quality. So that’s going to be really cool. It’s a really funny video.

GI: Was there anything in there that you wish you could have added?

Payton: Yeah. I don’t know if I can say this. Let’s just say that there were some cut scenes from games that I wanted to include. There’s a place where we kind of stashed away all of the cut scenes that I wanted to put into the DVD. And it’s called Volume 1 so if users really dig Saga and they start asking a bunch of questions. “Hey, where’s Volume 2?” Then maybe there’s a chance that he’s going to let me drag out some of those deleted scenes and put them in Volume 2.

GI: At Tokyo Game Show Mr. Kojima usually does stage presentations and there’s always a video. This year he had kind of a humor reel where they showed Raiden.

Payton: Right, Raiden. That’s going to be included on Subsistence too.

GI: Oh really?

Payton: Yeah, it’s in “Secret Theater.” We made like 14 of those joke clips.

GI: So that’s all in Subsistence?

Payton: That’s in Subsistence too. It’s going to be hilarious. Those joke clips are so funny.

GI: So the packaging is pretty slick.

Payton: The same guy who did the E3 pamphlet designed the package. He’s so crazy and hard to work with… in a good way. You know, he’s so demanding. He’s like, “We need more budget.” I’m like, “You know how much we’re giving you for this package? This is a lot of money.” He’s like, “I need more. I want silver foil embossed on the front. Otherwise this is not going to fly.” He’s all about simplicity. So when he found out this was going to be a pre-order DVD he’s like, “Well, then I don’t have to put the title on there because it’s not going to be sold on store shelves.” I’m like, “Yeah?” He’s said, “Great, I can finally do what I wanted to do.” And he wanted to have a cover without a title. He just thought that the five stars would signify the saga.

GI: So who did the design?

Payton: His name is Ichiro Kutome. But you have to put the logo on the side, but he was pretty happy to do this. He’s pretty hardcore.

GI: What were your biggest challenges with putting this DVD together?

Payton: Time. It took a long time to get the final approval and the budget and everything so when I got the go sign I literally had about three weeks to put it all together. That’s hiring a narrator, writing the script, collecting all of the movies that were going to run while the narrator’s talking, getting Shinkawa to cooperate and show us some never before released sketches of the boss like you saw, and we had Mr. Kojima come in to interview him and ask him certain questions. “Could you talk about MGS4, something you’ve never talked about before?” And he agreed to do that too. At the end of the fifth chapter he talks about what he’s planning to do with the characters for MGS4.

GI: Who is the narrator?

Payton: His name is Jack Merluzzi. He’s also providing the narration for the third disc on Subsistence, the Snake Eater movie. So we had him come back in because we were happy with the way he narrated that movie. That’s going to be really exciting too, by the way. The third disc.

GI: How much involvement did Kojima have in the production of Saga?

Payton: He’ll give the okay. This is not just for Saga, but for games too. He needs to see a very detailed plan so we had to come back with three different kinds of concept ideas before he gave the okay. He would edit, “This is not going to work. You need to fix this.” And then I’d come back and he’d say, “Okay, I give my stamp of approval. You do it.” And then he’s hands off because he’s got enough stuff to worry about. Then we come back and have a beta version I guess you could say, a working version, and he gives some comments and we come back again. We just kind of do that process.

It wasn’t day to day things, but on a weekly basis we’d have to present something to him. Like the intro movie we showed on the stage, that went over really well. We were really worried that he wouldn’t like it, but he was like, “This is cool.” That was the thing I was most worried about. Because Metal Gear is so distinct and he’s so particular about Metal Gear. He’ll ask us to change the smallest things and he said okay to the intro, which I was so happy about.

GI: Is there a guy at Kojima Productions that you go to to check if something’s right like, “Hey is this shirt okay?”

Payton: It’s funny that you mention that because that was one of his requests. He said, “Okay Ryan. You can do this, but you’ve got to work with Mr. Shida.” And I was like, “Okay, that would be an honor.” Because Mr. Shida is somebody that we work with on all of our games and he’s that one guy. He knows the Metal Gear world better than anybody, almost as much as Mr. Kojima. He knows all of the name spellings. I almost had an error in Saga where I called the young Ocelot from Snake Eater, I said he was Adamska Shalashaska. But according to Mr. Shida those are his two different names. It’s not a full name, Adamska Shalashaska, they’re actually individual names. Sometimes he’s called Adamska and sometimes he’s called Shalashaska. Shalashaska’s not his last name. So he fixed that. This is really like the canon of Metal Gear. It was checked over by Mr. Shida, which gives it authenticity I think.

GI: Are there going to be plans for other things like this?

Payton: That’s one of the things, right when Saga was wrapping up we were working nonstop. We were sleeping in the office, me and the video guy, and Mr. Kojima took us out to dinner and he said, “I’m really proud of you guys because this is something that I really wanted to do with Kojima Productions was to give my employees the opportunity to try something new.” So he said, “Next time you have an idea let me know.” So hopefully this is not the last thing I work on. And guys on the other team are just starting to get opportunities. I can’t talk about these projects specifically, but young guys got the okay recently to do some kind of cool project too. That’s the atmosphere of Kojima Productions. I think an atmosphere that any game studio would want is to have a programmer think about cool things they could do just outside of their daily job. So I’m willing to take on any project even if it means overtime because it’s a great team.

GI: What is it like working there? I mean, going from translating at an Xbox 360 press event to all of the sudden you’re on that poster “Directed by Ryan Payton. Produced by Hideo Kojima.”

Payton: I feel so lucky. Especially because, yeah, it says directed by Ryan Payton, but it’s just not fair because I’ve been given this opportunity to do this and I have the best team. The guy who mastered the sound is the sound director on MGS4. The sound on this is incredible. Nobody else has this opportunity. It’s like a one in a million chance to have Mr. Tojima, the sound director of Metal Gear 4, and Mr. Shida. Having this team at my fingertips to make this DVD was such an awesome privilege. I feel really lucky.