Metal Gear Solid's Cyborg Ninja is one of the 1998 game's most memorable characters, backflipping all over protagonist Snake with his chiseled exoskeleton and hissing haunting musings about life. But the cerebral humanoid soldier might not have ever got the chance to stick a katana in your face if director Hideo Kojima hadn't been so enthusiastic about character designer Yoji Shinkawa's art.
"From the very first [design] plans I drafted, Shinkawa was in there changing things on his own," Kojima told PlayStation in a recently resurfaced interview from 1998. He cited Cyborg Ninja as a product of his and Shinkawa's "push-and-pull" creative process, explaining that he originally had no plans for a totally jacked android man.
