After entering the video game industry and moving to Okamoto to live…

“I was already involved in the game industry, but at the beginning, I was staying in a boarding house and was watching VHS tapes. That's when I first encountered Mr. Oshii's mystery article file, 538. I was really surprised.”

When still a student, Kojima wrote an unpublished novel titled Kodoku no Toh: on Christmas Eve a lonely college student gets drunk at a party in an automated tower near Osaka Station and wakes locked inside by its AI. After failing even by setting a fire to escape, he decides that the food, information, and entertainment of that comfortable isolation might be better than his life outside, until a year later he looks out a window and sees something strange.

Kojima says that going to a bookstore was a daily routine he did not abandon even during the frenetic start of his studio. There he takes books in his hands, buys the ones that call to him, and loses himself reading them; on business trips he is not at ease unless he has several books in his bag, and he considers choosing and reading books to be part of who he is.

“These games had their own worlds and stories. I felt a certain authorial quality in them.”

Kojima was playing Mr. Horii’s remake of the adventure game “The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case The Okhotsk Disappearance” and enjoying the nostalgic game. Time management was important to him, so he was shifting some of the time he spent on movies and reading to games.