Believe it or not, it wasn't Hideo Kojima's idea to have a Metal Gear Solid spin-off centered around Raiden, as the series creator actually would have preferred to go with cyborg ninja Gray Fox.
In an interview with IGN, Kojima explained the reasoning behind the decision to go with Raiden despite his initial desire to have a game starring Frank Jaegar.
It was actually not my idea, it was my staff in Kojima Productions that insisted on Raiden, and I respected their idea. I wanted to really focus on production than development, and they wanted to come up with a really cool hack-and-slash title with some Katana action and Raiden in it, and I thought ‘okay, that’s fine, I respect that’.
But in my personal opinion, I wanted to go for Frank Jaegar or Gray Fox. But if we had gone with that, I would have had to write the script and then be really committed to creating the game. I want to pass game development to the younger generation in my team, and have been trying to do so for quite some time.
I don't know about you, but I really hope that this doesn't rule out the possibility that we'll one day see a Metal Gear Solid title centered around the tragic tale of Gray Fox. Are you glad that we're getting to play as Raiden in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance or would you have rather seen a game starring Gray Fox as well? Let us know in the comments below.
