Hayter: ‘I’ve got no particular love for Kojima’

The long-time voice of Metal Gear’s Solid Snake has revealed the hurt he felt at being ejected from the series.

David Hayter’s reign as the star voice in Konami’s series came to and end with Metal Gear Solid 5, when he was replaced by 24 star Kiefer Sutherland.

"I’ve got no particular love for Kojima," Hayter told Game Informer. "I don’t feel any need to go back and work with him again.

I was so annoyed by the Metal Gear V debacle, and people said, ‘Are you gonna play the game?’ Yeah. That’ll be 60 hours of humiliation that I can’t get to. I haven’t played the latest two iterations, because it’s just too painful.

I thought that I had given a lot to the series and really helped promote it. At the same time, I genuinely feel that the run I had as Snake was remarkable. If you get that once in your career, that’s amazing. I don’t have any ill will toward Kiefer Sutherland or anything like that. The whole thing could have been handled better and a little more respectfully, but I’m not going to cry about it.”

Hayter even claimed that Kojima had wanted to get rid of him long before he was eventually dropped.

I talked to Kris Zimmerman (Metal Gear English casting and voice director),” Hayter added. She said, ‘We’re going forward, but it looks like they are going to try and replace you.’ They tried to do that before, and it never worked. They tried to get voice matches, and it never happened.

I had to re-audition for Metal Gear 3 to play Naked Snake. They made me re-audition to play Old Snake, and the whole time, they were trying to find somebody else to do it. I heard that Kojima asked one of the producers on Metal Gear 3 to ask Kurt Russell if he would take over for that game. He didn’t want to do it.”