As a child, inspired by Motojiro Kajii’s “The Lemon,” Kojima would sneak California lemons into places he did not like and leave them there. In his imagination they were perfect grenades: he could carry them anywhere, operate them alone, and use them to blow the world apart whenever he wanted.
As a child, Kojima liked being at school when it rained. The curtain of bad weather made the building feel isolated, but beneath the fluorescent lights and surrounded by teachers and friends he did not feel lonely; he imagined the school as a spaceship in the darkness. During typhoons he fantasized that only the children in his grade were drifting and could create their own world and rules, apart from the world the adults had prepared.
“It became a habit which I still have. ... I'd think up stories because I had so much time alone.”
As a child of working parents, Kojima wore his house key on a cord around his neck like a dog tag; it annoyed him when he did somersaults on the horizontal bar, but he wore it at all times. No one ever picked him up from school—even in rain, during a typhoon, or when he was sick—so he would unlock and enter an empty house, turn on the lights and the air conditioner or heater, and sometimes cry at his mother’s vanity or wander the streets to delay coming home.
Newsweek reported in 2001 that Kojima, as a child, played outdoor games like thief-and-detective — the Japanese equivalent of hide-and-seek — with his friends, flattening himself against walls and peeking around corners much as Solid Snake does.
Kojima described his father as a chemist involved in the development of new medicines who, within the corporate structure, was nevertheless a salaryman enduring crowded trains, conflicts with coworkers and persistent fatigue while continuing to work, and who finally managed to buy a house in a Kansai suburb. In that newly created town with no shared past, families and children measured one another by academic background and job title as if playing a card game; Kojima rebelled by choosing the then-young video game industry, where he believed titles weren’t necessary and only a person’s ability mattered.