For one, he wouldn't have footage of the game in front of him as he was working, so had to rely primarily on Kojima's vague direction, which was often hard to interpret. Gregson-Williams realized as soon as he came on board that the setup would be different to what he was used to in film. He wasn't dismissive about it-but he did say, 'Watch out, you're here to try and build a path to being a film composer.'' At the time, I was under the care of Hans Zimmer.

He really liked the way my film scores were shaping up and would like his game to sound like that. I knew what he was up to and he approached me by email, I think. I wouldn't have had a desire for it necessarily, had Hideo not himself approached me. 'I don't think at that time, many filmmakers had, so I didn't really have a precedent for it. 'I hadn't considered doing video games at all,' reveals Gregson-Williams. At that time, he was still an upcoming composer, but he had done Enemy of the State, so a lot of people had started to notice him.' So Hideo asked me to try and get in touch with Harry, because Harry was working for Hans Zimmer too in that studio at that time. We originally wanted to get Hans Zimmer, but he was like 'No, I can't do it for that kind of money'-he's so expensive, it's ridiculous. 'We went to Media Ventures (now known as Remote Control Productions), which is Hans Zimmer's studio. 'Because we were so successful with Metal Gear Solid, Hideo said 'Okay, we have a budget, maybe we can hire a Hollywood composer,'' Muranaka says. As a result, Kojima and his team, who had initially been reluctant to do a sequel, began conceiving ideas to enhance the audio experience for the next installment. With the sequel, however, the team was targeting Sony's next-generation console, the PlayStation 2, and were therefore presented with a much larger budget and more lenient hardware limitations.

Konami's sound team (Takanari Ishiyama, Gigi Meroni, Kazuki Muraoka, Lee Jeon Myung, and Hiroyuki Togo) composed the score, with Tappi Iwase providing the main theme and Muranaka contributing the credits song entitled 'The Best is Yet to Come.' Excluding some exceptions, the majority of the game's soundtrack boasted a synthetic sound, with sampled strings being used intermittently in order to boost tension and emulate a more cinematic approach. The first Metal Gear Solid game released on PlayStation 1 in 1998 to critical acclaim.

They told us more about how this collaboration came to be, the challenges they faced in regards to memory, and the philosophy behind the game's approach to dynamic music. Over the course of the last few months, we've spoken to those who were involved in the creation of this score.

The resulting collaboration was an ambitious score that mixed high-quality acoustic recordings with electronic samples, to create an epic sound that still retained the ambient and dynamic qualities of its PlayStation predecessor. Gregson-Williams didn't work alone, however, with the score representing a joint effort between him, the producer Rika Muranaka, and Konami's in-house sound team-most notably, the composer Norihiko Hibino. So, in order to accomplish this, Konami brought onboard the Hollywood composer Harry Gregson-Williams, who had worked on huge films like Armageddon, The Replacement Killers, and Enemy of the State. From the word go, the director on the project, Hideo Kojima, wanted the sequel to sound like a big Hollywood movie.

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