As he approached fifty, Kojima acknowledged that studio work was…

Kojima described Satoshi Itoh as one of the fans who most deeply understood his works, to the point Itoh became known as a “Kojima fundamentalist.” After Itoh’s literary debut as Project Itoh they became friends and respected each other as creators with similar tastes; Itoh’s death in the spring of 2009 made Kojima feel he had lost both a recipient of his memes and a precious son.

Kojima recalled that twenty-five years earlier he had incorporated a story and a message into video games when both were regarded as unnecessary. With the rise of mobile games used to kill time, he saw Minagawa’s literary activity at age eighty-two as the baton to receive. He promised to continue as he is even after turning eighty and to instill his memes into video games.

“I gave a USB stick with all my ideas on it to my personal assistant, kind of like a will. [...] Perhaps I have ten years?”

“When she defeated The End she called me up and said: 'It is finished'.”

“I thought that I could never recover. I felt like I might not ever be able to create a game again.”