"I’ve been saying for a long time now that I want to make something weird. I had an idea, for example, for a CD game where if the player dies, the disc itself actually breaks. I want to make something *that* weird. Of course it sounds like a commercial disaster waiting to happen, right? Plus I had the Metal Gear series to contend with, which always got prioritized over other projects. But in my head all these game ideas have been piling up, being warehoused for future use, and one of them was a hazy idea for a game that used the sun somehow. Then the GBA came out, and it was more powerful than the Super Famicom. Wow—handheld hardware is starting to get really good, I thought."

"For a game that uses the sun, I knew a sensor would be the best choice. But I had absolutely no idea how to make that happen. As it happened, a little before that Konami had been designing some portable, handheld medical devices equipped with a variety of sensors. And so when that got released on the market, my previously vague concept of “catching the rays of the sun” came into clearer focus—if we attach this sensor to a GBA cart, it could work! That was the official start of everything. It was right around the end of the Metal Gear Solid 2 development.

"Originally, I thought we’d make a different type of game. It wasn’t going to be a sequel to Ghost Babel or anything, but I actually wanted to use the “hiding” (stealth) concept in Metal Gear 2 to create an entirely different kind of “escape game.” It would have begun with you being caught and imprisoned by the enemy… I thought a game like that could work really well on a portable system, but after a lot of planning, it turned out we just couldn’t work it into something satisfying. At that point, although it was quite a risk, we decided to challenge ourselves with an entirely new game."