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 receiver. Much like your phone emits audio and image, this could be transmitted globally, essentially adding another sense to digital communication. “The idea is to add smell to the visual and audio information we already share remotely, making those experiences more engaging,” Ohio State University doctoral student, Chunyu Yang, said.
Right now, the technology only recognizes five scents, but researchers claim that “a broader scent library is possible in principle” if the e-nose is trained to recognize them. It’s not exactly designed to make disks smell like blood, but so that customers can sample scents when shopping online, for items like perfume, soap, and candles, or to “share the scent of a meal with a family or friends who live far away.” But considering that Sony has already patented a smell-o-vision-style aroma technology for video games and virtual reality, it’s not out of the realm of possibility to imagine someone like Kojima taking advantage of these advancements to revisit older ideas, like making your Xbox stink like a rotting corpse.
I just hope that Capcom doesn’t catch wind of Scentronic and start using it for Resident Evil, because the last thing I want is to know what the Raccoon City sewers smell like.
