Konami's recent Metal Gear Solid HD Collection is an odd product for shipping without anything called "Metal Gear Solid HD" in the box. One part of series creator Hideo Kojima views the omission as a call to be answered, while another is eager to spend less time in the past.

"There are a lot of people wanting remakes of the original, and as producer I want to answer those calls," Kojima tells Official PlayStation Magazine. "But as a creator I'm not very interested in going back. If we were to do it, it would have to be a total remake - the only thing that would be the same would be the story. If it happened at some point I would stay as a producer, but would have to hand off most of the actual creating."

We've heard of Metal Gear Solid's seemingly inevitable continuation before, and of Kojima's wearying dance between director and producer. The first Metal Gear Solid is satisfactory in being "the game I wanted to make," says Kojima, who sounds like he'd rather not meddle and make it once more -- never mind that it's already been redone in MGS: Twin Snakes with the help of Silicon Knights and Nintendo. "If you bring the gameplay up to modern standards, then you lose a bit of the original game. It was a game made for a certain era - not just the story, but the controls and everything about it reflect that era in which the game was made."

That's right. Back in the day, there wasn't enough visual fidelity to tell whose footprints those were -- and we liked it.