Hideo Kojima Defends Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker Product Tie-ins

Wednesday's Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker completion ceremony press conference offered plenty of new gameplay details and even sweet new trailers for the upcoming PSP entry in the Metal Gear Solid series.

But the big news from the event was the vast array of collaborations Kojima Productions has cooked up for the game. As detailed here, Peace Walker is teaming up with everything from Dorritos to Mountain Dew for cross promotions that will feature both in and out of the game.

It seems that some fans haven't taken too kindly to all the product tie-ins. This has prompted series creator and Peace Walker designer Hideo Kojima to issue a comment via his Twitter.

Wrote Kojima earlier today: "Regarding the collaborations, I have one reason for doing them. It's because I want to surprise the players. If the surprise and freshness were lost, I would stop the collaborations. It's different from Hollywood-style merchandizing."

Peace Walker, of course, isn't the first game to have cross promotions. A recent promotion-heavy case is Sega's Phantasy Star Portable 2, which teamed up with such brands as Fanta and Pizza Hut. Cross promotions appear to be one of the major draws for Sega's reality-based Yakuza series, as much of Sega's pre-release PR effort for part 4 went into weekly announcements of new tie-ins.

Metal Gear Solid itself is no stranger to product tie-ins. PS3's Metal Gear Solid 4 had deals with such major brands as iPod, Calorie Mate and Uniqlo. These tie-ins were announced in 2008 in similar fashion to the Peace Walker tie-ins, at a pre-release press conference.