When still a student, Kojima wrote an unpublished novel titled Kodoku…

Kojima first discovered 2001 in 1978, in his third year of junior high, when he bought a mook—purchased for its Star Wars coverage—that also included full-color images, diagrams and interviews about Kubrick’s film. As a reader of hard SF who dreamed of becoming an astronaut, he felt more drawn to 2001 than to space-opera. While waiting for a rerelease he read Arthur C. Clarke’s novel and listened to a radio-play adaptation, and he was fortunate to see the film for the first time in Cinerama in Osaka. From then on he attended every subsequent rerelease on the big screen.

Kojima placed his awakening to reading in fifth grade, when he plunged into mystery novels from around the world. He continued with them through sixth grade, and upon finishing elementary school he moved on to science fiction, which he described as his companion until college; from that period he barely remembers reading anything else.

During a December lunch break Kojima opened Tout Seul in a Roppongi bookstore and immediately recognized his own Tower of Solitude. He hurried it back to work, locked himself in with a “no entry” placard, finished the first reading, waited exactly until the end of the workday to reread it alone in a planning suite, read it a third time to reflect, and then cried when he realized another creator had imagined a solitude very similar to the novel he had kept for nearly thirty years.

After entering the video game industry and moving to Okamoto to live alone, Kojima brought only his bed, stereo, and bicycle from home; he did not yet have a TV or air conditioning, ate all his meals outside, and on hot, lonely nights took walks to bookstores that stayed open late. In one of those stores he discovered Yukinobu Hoshino’s 2001 Nights; its art and mature science-fiction content rekindled his passion for the genre and led him to hunt through used bookstores and otaku shops for all of Hoshino’s work.

“this is exactly the kind of thing I have always wanted to create. Not a game merely played to "pass the time", but something that would be important to one's own life experience.”