Hideo Kojima has one big regret with Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and it's all about a song he couldn't secure the rights to

Hideo Kojima has one big regret surrounding Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and it's all to do with one song. Be warned: story spoilers for Peace Walker follow!

Near the conclusion of the PSP game, The Boss takes control of the Peace Walker AI weapon, and has it effectively commit suicide by drowning itself. The machine, or rather, The Boss, sings the track 'Sing' by Joe Raposo, which was originally written for Sesame Street, but then shot to greater fame when it was covered by The Carpenters. 

It's this moment that Kojima has a lot of regrets about. In the tweet below, the director reveals that another song was originally planned to close out The Boss' section in Peace Walker in the ending segment, but Kojima and Konami couldn't secure the rights to the song itself, even though they went and apparently visited the family that the track belongs to.

If I have one regret about PW, it’s the part when the AI weapon modeled after The Boss's personality sings a song while committing suicide by drowning. At first, I had planned to use a certain famous song that perfectly fit the "peace" and "70's" theme of the game. We kept… https://t.co/Z1BMJUZj6qApril 29, 2024

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Instead, Kojima had to use Sing instead, which wasn't his first choice, but is still nonetheless a "great song" according to the director. Kojima doesn't reveal which track was the first choice for The Boss' final scene, but it fit "perfectly" with Peace Walker's themes of "peace" and the 1970s at large. 

Elsewhere, Kojima expands on how Peace Walker came about, since the game celebrated its fourteenth anniversary yesterday. Apparently the game was originally called Metal Gear Solid 5: Peace Walker, until Konami's marketing department "heavily opposed" the idea. We'd have to wait four more years to get the next numbered entry in the Metal Gear Solid series.

14 years since the release of “PW.”I was still in my mid-40s. At the time, many game companies were beginning to shift to developing apps for the phones. After finishing up MGS4, I felt the need for a proprietary game engine. The vertical leap of the game had to be done after the… pic.twitter.com/vZ3fyCfmkdApril 29, 2024

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"The target age group was lowered to elementary, junior high, and high school students because it was for the PSP. The aim was to discover the younger generation and acquire fans of two generations: the kids and their parents," Kojima adds. 

Read up on our new games 2024 guide for a look over all the games we've got to look forward to, including Kojima's very own Death Stranding 2.