There were a lot of surprises - the way the Western developers do…

In 2012, while preparing to open Kojima Productions Los Angeles, Kojima envisioned the Tokyo and LA teams not as two separate sides but as a studio located in a third space between the two cities. He wanted a global goal to render location irrelevant and for the outcome to be not merely a patchwork of Japanese memes with something American, but a creation global in the truest sense.

In 2026 Kojima was scheduled to give a talk at the Game Developers Conference about his fateful decision a decade ago to go independent after a messy breakup with Konami, but he withdrew without offering an explanation; Kojima Productions announced he would not attend and said that some members of the studio would still present at the event.

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.

“I wouldn't dictate to them - "you should do things this way, use this color, change this..." - I'd have to really try to help them do what they do best as production studios. That's how I plan to do it in the future, and to give them freedom.”

“In my previous company, I was free to do what I wanted, but it wasn't my own brand. ... The only way is to produce it yourself.”