Hideo Kojima has always been an oddball, even back in the '80s as an up-and-coming designer at Konami, where his ambitious ideas caused so much friction that he almost quit during Metal Gear's development. But one of his most outlandish pitches came while working on the cyberpunk graphic adventure game Snatcher. He wanted to coat the game's floppy disks in a paint that smelled like blood so that once a player's PC warmed up, it would melt and make their bedroom reek "like a murder scene."
Melting paint inside a disk drive doesn't just risk damaging the hardware; it's a walking liability for whatever chemical fumes it emits into a confined space. It also means that once the paint melts, the trick is done—making it a destructive one-time novelty. Konami execs predictably shut it down, leaving Kojima's "Smell Project" permanently shelved.
Nearly 40 years later, however, scientists and hardware devs are building digital scent emitters that might finally make Kojima's vision a reality.
As reported by Reuters, researchers have developed a new technology called Scentronic that uses an "e-nose" to recognize smells that can be sent through a remote device, releasing matching scent molecules to the...
