Snake’s Japanese Voice Wants One More Metal Gear. Akio Otsuka Also Has Advice for Actors Facing AI

Akio Otsuka has voiced Solid Snake in Japanese for nearly three decades, and he once said he didn’t want to do a Metal Gear without Hideo Kojima. In a long interview with Bunshun Online, he says the fans deserve one more game, won’t say whether he’s told Kojima, and has some blunt advice for younger actors about AI.

The interview ran in two parts on October 4. He’s 66 now. In Japan his deep, gravelly voice is everywhere, in anime, games and dubbed Hollywood films. Gamers around the world know it as Snake’s.

Snake is where the headlines came from. English-language outlets picked up the story within a day and didn’t agree on what it meant.

“Kept you waiting” was never in the script

Start with the line every Metal Gear fan can do in their sleep. Snake’s famous “Kept you waiting, huh?”, “Mataseta na” in Japanese, was Otsuka’s own invention. “It was an ad-lib during the game itself,” he told Bunshun. “After that, it was used in commercials too.”

How do you get away with an ad-lib in a game? “Well, because Director Hideo Kojima, who made it, was right there in front of me (laughs). You can leave it to him to choose what stays and what goes,” Otsuka said. He added that it wouldn’t work on a dubbed Western game, “but in older games we recorded the lines first and the visuals were added afterward.”

He also told the story behind Snake’s meeting with Big Boss at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, where Big Boss was voiced by his father, the late Chikao Otsuka. “Back then I was the motion actor for Big Boss, and my father fitted his lines to my performance,” he said. “When he got to the set, his eyes went wide at the sight of me in a motion capture suit, and he said in surprise, ‘So I’m putting my voice on you?’ That was fun.”

The promise he can’t take back

Kojima left Konami in 2015, the same year the last numbered game, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, came out. Otsuka was famously in tears at the 2019 launch event for Death Stranding, Kojima’s first game as an independent studio. He explained why. “After leaving the company, he went through hardship after hardship and saw a huge project through to the end. Thinking about that, how could you not cry? We had worked together all that time.”

Then came the promise. “Basically, our job as voice actors is to do the work when we’re asked,” he said. “But the Metal Gear series is something Director Kojima created, and I take pride in having built it with him. That’s why I said, ‘I don’t want to do a Metal Gear that Director Kojima isn’t involved in.’ Having said it, I can’t really back down now (laughs).”

He knows the bind it puts him in. “Whatever happens between Director Kojima and Konami, to the fans Snake ought to be Akio Otsuka,” he said. “When I think about the fans… I really am caught in the middle.”

Konami has kept his voice in the series anyway. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, its 2025 remake, reused the voice recordings from the 2004 original, so Otsuka’s Snake is already in a Konami Metal Gear made after Kojima left.

“Let’s make one more Metal Gear”

Bunshun’s interviewer reminded him that on the YouTube show Mori no Su, hosted by voice actors Shotaro Morikubo and Kohei Amasaki, he’d said they might as well make one more. Did he still mean it?

“I really do think so. For Metal Gear fans all over the world,” he answered. “There are fans all over the world waiting impatiently for it. So for them, let’s make one more Metal Gear. He’s making his own work with Death Stranding, so I feel like, why not?”

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Has he said as much to Kojima? “I’ll leave that to your imagination (laughs).”

That answer, and the “why not” before it, split the English coverage in two.

Both come from the same few sentences. TheGamer’s translation has him saying “Why not? It’s okay to do it.” In the Japanese, he never says who should make it. Konami hasn’t announced a new Metal Gear, and Kojima is busy with Physint, an original spy game of his own.

What AI can’t make

The second half of the interview turns to the job itself, and it’s the part working voice actors may want to read twice. Since his book on the profession, Seiyu Damashii, came out eleven years ago, he says, “In the last ten years, and especially the last five, the speed of change has kept getting faster, and it surprises me.”

Some of it worries him. “Among young actors today, the good ones are really good, and the ones who aren’t good aren’t really acting at all,” he said. “In a world where AI keeps advancing, I wonder if the ones who can’t act will be able to survive.”

His answer to the machines isn’t a better voice. “For me, it’s not the voice,” he said. “What I want to value is whether the performance in that moment, the line in that moment, stabs right into the audience’s chest or not.”

And then the line that sums up the whole interview. “The more AI evolves, the better it’s bound to get at technique than we are. So I feel the most important thing for surviving is to keep facing toward the question of what AI can’t make.”

He named actors who get it right. Of Takahiro Sakurai and Koki Uchiyama, he said: “Their lines aren’t lies. They’re not lying. Acting is a lie to begin with, so if you make people think ‘that’s a lie,’ it’s all for nothing.”

Just go for the first take

His frustration with today’s sessions will sound familiar to any director. “I think it’s fine to score zero at first, but fewer people take risks now, and it feels like having no retakes is what counts as right,” he said. “I think, ‘What are they on about? You should just go for it on the first take.'”

At 66, he says his job in the room has changed too. “If I were all sharp edges, the whole studio would get tense (laughs). So I always try to give off the feeling of, ‘Look, I’m just a silly old man. This is fun.'”

“I really do think voice actors are craftspeople,” he said. Whether you hit it big is luck, he believes. “But whether you survive or disappear doesn’t feel like luck to me.”

Whether Snake ever speaks new lines again is up to Konami, and maybe to Kojima. Otsuka has said his piece. He’d like one more, for the fans.

Sources: Bunshun Online, two-part interview with Akio Otsuka, Oct. 4, 2026 (Metal Gear and Kojima; the voice acting profession); TheGamer (Oct. 5, 2026); Power Up Gaming (Oct. 5, 2026); Wikipedia (Akio Otsuka roles; Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater). Quotations from Japanese sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Images: RGG Studio (SEGA), from its official interview with Akio Otsuka.

Lee este artículo en español: La voz japonesa de Snake quiere un Metal Gear más. Akio Otsuka también aconseja a los actores frente a la IA

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