After about two hours of speaking in GDC, Hideo Kojima ended his keynote with an interesting slide. Yet again, he's teasing this next installment in the Metal Gear franchise. Note from the picture below that the "S" is included after the "MG". Also, I'm pretty sure you can clearly see that dude with the sword at the top corner. Is that Raiden or just some random guy with a sword?

Of course, this last slide of Kojima's keynote could be nothing more than just that - a slide. Read into the pic as much as you want (Metal Gear Echochrome, anyone?), but whatever happens, we won't arrive at anything concrete without official word from Kojima or Konami.

This slide was shown after a 2-hour run of talking about years and years of development that went into the entire Metal Gear series. From the very first game, all the way up to MGS4, including some portable spinoffs and what not along the way.

Kojima thinks that it's going to be crucial for them to overcome lots of developmental obstacles and merge the good points of Japanese and western dev practices. If these were in their proper place, it'd allow them to move into their next mission - the "next MGS." To quote him:

And in the future of Kojima Productions and how we design games, I want to add both the western and Japanese way of hardware advancement and software advancement, and then add the game design ladder [all the way up into the new mission:] The next MGS.

---

Related articles:

• Hideo Kojima giving keynote at GDC 2009