Before becoming a designer, Kojima turned to stories as a compass…

During his creative work, Kojima said he sometimes suffers intense feelings of isolation, stress, and doubt. He is saved by knowing that writers, directors, artists, or other people committed to creating connections exist; their struggles become stories that relieve his loneliness. Likewise, an extraordinary work produced in a faraway country shows him that he can still keep trying.

Kojima called the video game designer his tiger form: upon transforming into it, he said he had shed the pride and shyness that had held back his writing. He thus found another way to pass his stories to later generations, no longer as prose but as video games.

“I don't play games so much. I watch movies, read books, meet people and go to museums, and I'm not copying anything from a game. And there are lot of game creators just watching other games,”

“In the beginning, I would say the answer to that is yes. I had very specific people in mind when I created a game, and I had a message that I wanted to pass along. But now my thought process is changing.”

After the Tohoku earthquake, fans and associates from around the world advised Kojima to leave Japan and use his life and resources to create elsewhere rather than spend them rebuilding the past. Kojima did not leave: he realized he could not separate his own purpose from Japan’s reconstruction and that, despite considering himself cosmopolitan, his substance was innately Japanese. Satori helped him out of the standstill with a further conclusion: he should not confine himself to Eastern, Western, or national labels, but create and share his own world—the world of Hideo Kojima.