When Geoff Keighley presented Hideo Kojima with the Industry Icon award during last night's Game Awards he mentioned something about Kojima being locked in a room of self-reflection. It turns out that he wasn't simply making an allusion to what Konami put Kojima through, but to what really happened.
According to Keighley, Konami locked Kojima away from the developers working on Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, making him develop and direct the game through other people. It was as though Konami was pretending to be a villain from their own game series.
"I haven't talked much about that, but it was such a difficult time because he was going through a lot last year," said Keighley to Glixel. Keighley went on to detail how shocked he was when he found out that Konami didn't allow Kojima to attend last year's Game Awards. "The fact that he finished that game, under those circumstances, is just amazing. He was locked in a separate room on a different floor than his development team for the final six months of development. He couldn't even talk to them – he had to talk through someone else. That's how that game was finished."
It's interesting that some Metal Gear Solid 5 players found the game's ending to be dissatisfying and it's very likely that the disjointedness came from Kojima's direction coming from a third-party.
While the game's end cannot be rectified, Kojima has been hard at work rebuilding his world and creating a new game, Death Stranding.
