Yoji Shinkawa

“I originally had no plans to add a character like that.”

“I've probably looked at 10,000 candidates myself at this point, and I've never seen anyone who I immediately wanted to give an S until Shinkawa. He's the only one, and it was an instant hanamaru (the Japanese equivalent of a "gold star").”

“when the human pilot gets in, that life is being breathed into the mech for the first time. Like, even though it's a weapon, when it moves it feels like a living creature. But when the pilot exits and it's left alone, it looks just like a jeep or tank or some regular vehicle, and once the pilot gets in and is driving it, it looks like a dinosaur.”

“Up to now—in Policenauts, for example, I used to give the designers very specific instructions [...] but this game was different.”

“We went to go buy dry ice but they didn't have any, so with no other options, even though I don't smoke I lit some cigarettes and blew smoke everywhere. (laughs)”

“When Kojima first announces something, everyone thinks he's joking. But then he starts making it just as he said and we realize after the fact, "oh, he was serious." (laughs) [...] If you leave him to his devices though he'll actually do the crazy stuff he says.”

“among the preliminary sketches I drew, one of them looked like a dinosaur, and Kojima did single that one out. "Let's go with this."”

“If I direct the same team, it will only lead to the same game being made.”

“Shinkawa was born to be a video game artist.”

Since Kojima Productions was founded in 2015, its motto has been "From Sapiens to Ludens": the idea of humanity evolving from Homo Sapiens (the one who thinks) to Homo Ludens (the one who plays and creates). Its mascot, Ludens — designed with Yoji Shinkawa — is a spacesuit-clad figure carrying a flag, a symbol of arrival and exploration rather than conquest.

Kojima wrote that Policenauts was also a meeting place: thanks to that magnetic field he met Shinkawa and the rest of the core staff of what would later become his studio, and many people inside and outside the company who still support him; he concluded it is a road that connects to the present and a past he can no longer return to, but that work still shines with a strong light.