27 years ago, the record holder for the longest cutscene in a video game, Hideo Kojima, said that the “one thing” he didn’t want in Metal Gear Solid was characters that just “gibbered at each other for 4-5 minutes.”

Hideo Kojima is now known for his long cutscenes, but he used to be much more cautious about them.

There are many players who don’t like long cutscenes. After all, the point of a game is to play it, right? Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima hasn’t bothered with this for a long time, and the fourth game in the spy series holds the record for the longest continuous cutscene in any game at a whopping 71 minutes to this day. Except, funnily enough, Kojima didn’t always seem too eager to include such long cutscenes. As he discovered Scams (Thanks, GamesRadar) in a 1997 interview with Famitsu, the iconic game developer talked about all things Metal Gear Solid before its release on the original PlayStation.

Interestingly, the topic of cutscenes came up, with Kojima saying: “However, I would like to avoid those boring scenes where the characters just chatter to each other for 4-5 minutes.” Only four or five minutes! Kojima, my friend, if only you knew what the future held for you (let’s not forget that 71 minutes may be the longest cutscene Kojima has ever had, but many of his other games have them too).

He even seemed a little hesitant about adding cutscenes at all, despite his known love of cinema, saying he was “worried about the theatrical presentation. For the direction to be effective, I feel like I may need to add unskippable cutscenes. Metal Gear’s story is very complicated, so I think there will be a need for cutscenes.”

It’s now clear that Kojima is thinking differently about cutscenes, and with Death Stranding 2 arriving next year (with a weird photo mode for starters), time will tell if he breaks his record. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this will be the case, if only because it would be fun.