Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima and Platinum Games producer Atsushi Inaba took the stage at Konami's offices here in Los Angeles earlier this week for a mea culpa of sorts: Kojima now admits that Metal Gear Solid Rising, though it may have looked nice in the trailer back at E3 2010, just wasn't working.

"In the summer of 2010, the team made a presentation for me," he recounted through a translator, "and I realized the game design still wasn't there yet." The team's vision was split between stealth and action, the idea of "cut everything" worked technically but made for gameplay that was too open-ended, and the game just wasn't fun, says Kojima. "As the young staff said to me, they wanted a good game that just felt good moving around, and we would never get that, so I decided to cancel the project."

"But still, we had a lot of things" that could still be used, says Kojima. "Motion capture, a lot of good story, the view of the world inside the game, and I wanted to use that somehow. I wanted Rising to be born again, so that's when I decided to contact Platinum Games."