Timeline

“After completing the game, it's my hope that players will continue developing the drama and the world in their imaginations. I think that's the "true interactivity" of Snatcher.”

“They may be entirely fictional, but somewhere in me the illusion persists that they are alive and real.”

“Act 1 and Act 2 are interactive scenarios, but Act 3 is different: a tragedy one cannot change–fate.”

“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.”

“Everyone has had that experience with a book, movie, or music and the like, where we secretly say to ourselves afterward: "I'm glad to have been alive and experienced this." [...] With Snatcher, I wanted to prove to myself that the new medium of games could do this too.”

“my concept for Snatcher was not to make a game with a broad and shallow appeal that anyone, "from children to adults!" could enjoy. The concept was different: this game would appeal to, and remain etched in, the heart of a very specific kind of person.”

“That was when I came up with the idea for Policenauts, and I once again realized, as I had for a long time already, that things I want to do with games are best expressed in the adventure genre.”

“When players finish a game I've made, I want my feelings to have reached them in one way or another; it's sort of like playing catch, but the ball is the themes I want the audience to receive.”

“what will happen if humans go into space?, or what will be the influence of living in space on the human body and human relationships?”

“In other words, I'm trying to create a game that will have a small but positive affect on players' actual lives. I know it sounds a little dramatic, but that's what I've been thinking about for a long time now.”

“First was the release of the movie Rising Sun and the outburst of "japan bashing" that it caused, and second was the public debate over organ transplantation and problems associated with people who had suffered brain death injuries.”

“I do like movies, but I wasn't trying to use the format of games as a vehicle for movies or anything. Rather, I feel that what the game industry lacks right now is the quality of lighting, acting, and direction that you find in movies.”

“So yeah, I didn't include the subtitles so it would look more like a movie. As a director, there's lots of scenes where I'd rather not have subtitles, but in the end I will choose what makes players happy, of course.”

“Gun games like Lethal Enforcers are really fun, but they don't really evoke much empathy from the player. I mean, enemies just come out of nowhere, then they die in one shot, ok bye bye!”

“I wondered if this might be the system where I could realize my original, full vision of Metal Gear… and the game that has emerged from that is Metal Gear Solid.”

“the essence of that fear may be closer to Clock Tower 2 than Resident Evil, I think. After vision, the second-most important kind of tension I wanted to create was audio.”

“You've got to have an entertaining side, like a Hollywood action movie. It's got to be fun as a game, and the intrigue of the world should gradually pull you in more and more, and by the ending credits you should be left with something to think about.”

“The reason why we're going to the trouble of actually modeling them this way, is that the 3D model reveals things to you that are hard to see in 2D. [...] we're building the structures with blocks and then using a CCD (a tiny camera) to peer inside them.”

“human beings, we all carry the burden of our humanity on our shoulders as we go through this life. Game characters haven't really had that much depth though, have they? They're always perfect angels, heroic types. Drama built around such characters rings a bit false to me.”

“In order to make the direction effective, I feel like I may have to add unskippable cutscenes. The story for Metal Gear is very complicated, so I think cutscenes will be necessary. The one thing I want to avoid, though, are those tedious scenes where characters are just blabbering at each other for 4 or 5 minutes.”

“Even though we're behind schedule, everyone at KCE Japan has been obsessed with Mario Kart 64. On break everyone rushes over to snatch up a controller, and the people waiting grab a Sega Saturn 3D control pad and do "image training", mimicking the movements while they watch and wait their turn.”

“In game design, I think the theme of a game occupies the same position of importance as the gameplay. The hardest part for me of any development is building a theme that will enliven and enrich the gameplay.”

“When I talk about "games that are like movies", I don't mean just having a bunch of FMVs. What I mean is a game that draws on the various elements and techniques of film: direction, script, lighting, etc.”

“even in normal conversations, the protagonist should have his gun at the ready, finger on the trigger. He must be cautious about not mistakenly firing his gun and killing an innocent person—yet at the same time, if he's too slow in deliberating he risks being killed himself.”

“I originally had no plans to add a character like that.”

“I've probably looked at 10,000 candidates myself at this point, and I've never seen anyone who I immediately wanted to give an S until Shinkawa. He's the only one, and it was an instant hanamaru (the Japanese equivalent of a "gold star").”

“when the human pilot gets in, that life is being breathed into the mech for the first time. Like, even though it's a weapon, when it moves it feels like a living creature. But when the pilot exits and it's left alone, it looks just like a jeep or tank or some regular vehicle, and once the pilot gets in and is driving it, it looks like a dinosaur.”

“Up to now—in Policenauts, for example, I used to give the designers very specific instructions [...] but this game was different.”

“designs that are "dishonest", weird, or that are just meant to be visually stimulating—like female characters with huge busts (laughs)—I don't like those. I wanted characters who, just from looking at their clothing you'd be able to tell what kind of person they were, and what their motivations were.”

“He's the developer of this Metal Gear REX weapon, and I like Japanese animation so I wanted to include a character who goes to anime conventions like Otakon in America. The image in my head was of a heavier guy, someone who's always eating a chocolate bar, but somewhere along the way he turned out as you see here.”

“We went to go buy dry ice but they didn't have any, so with no other options, even though I don't smoke I lit some cigarettes and blew smoke everywhere. (laughs)”

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

“Ever since middle school or thereabouts, for the longest time, I had wanted to make movies.”

“So I went around to different game companies, and partly because I was living in Hyogo prefecture at the time, but I thought I'd check out Konami.”

“When I told the senior devs on the team about my idea, they were very dismissive: 'There's no games like that.'”

“Our generation, raised on manga and western cinema, got used to the sight and idea of guns, but growing up here in Japan, in our actual lives there were no guns or gun violence. Our generation also witnessed the rise of environmental destruction and pollution, and an "end of the world" mentality was planted in our minds.”

“I mean, if you shoot someone the blood should be red colored. In the same way that a person who's been shot has to show a painful expression on their face. It's how you get people to recognize and understand that being shot with a gun actually IS painful.”

“I've heard the American military is using video games as training tools now too, making their soldiers play DOOM. Apparently people are more willing to pull a trigger on the battlefield if they've played these games. Of course, this leads to the impression that "games are training for murderers!"”

“Cinema, on the other hand, has a live quality. There's not much you can do about the weather on a given day, or the interplay of light and shadow at a certain time. And that's what I love about it, the way a cohesive work is stitched together from moment to moment.”

“I'd love to make a game based on one of Kobo Abe's novels though. I've also been thinking about saving up some money and trying to buy the rights to Yojimbo from Toho Cinema.”

“I grew up in the countryside myself, so I used to love the commotion of the city… the rust, the crowded roadsides, the electric wires. I loved all that. But after I turned 30 or so, it started to get a little tiresome…”

“Metal Gear Solid sells more in Europe and America than Japan. I was unapologetic about making something Japanese in taste, but amazingly it was received with more passion and enthusiasm by people overseas.”

“With games today, the characters are like dolls or puppets, so you can't really get "performances" out of them. You can animate them, and there's the voice actors, but that's it. You can't really get anything subtle. I'd love to be able to convey emotions like that but it's just not possible yet.”

“I'm afraid I'm too clumsy to juggle multiple projects at once.”

“With game consoles now being able to play DVDs, I actually feel like there will be a return to film. Kids that have only known games up to now will be able to buy DVDs and realize how interesting that world is—maybe more interesting to them.”

“My generation really took a lot from the cinema, and much of that remains an unconscious influence on what we make today. I like to call it our "cinema DNA."”

“I don't mean it in the cinematic sense per se: game direction is more about creating situations that draw players in emotionally, and about creating atmosphere.”

“We talked movies on that staircase for hours. You said you didn't mind waiting if it was a movie you really wanted to see. I guessed then, that here's a guy with the same DNA as me.”

“One thing I don't like about the game industry right now, is the clumsy addition of CG movies, without any sense of cinema. To the trained eye, it looks so amateurish.”

“I added a camera mode like that in Metal Gear, but all the developers hated it. The programmers, the designers too.”

“I feel like the video game industry right now is in its last year of elementary school. Everyone is aware that next year will be the start of a new experience with middle school, but no one has figured out what school it will be or what it will look like.”

“There was a sort of legend at Konami, that if you got involved in this project, you'd up demoted or transferred. (laughs) [...] once we got a working build running, and they saw that exclamation mark pop up when the enemy gets surprised, that sold them on the concept.”

“not being able to program, I had a very hard time making Metal Gear. As a planner you write what you want in the planning documents, and convey your image as best you can, but ultimately it comes down to the programmers' sensibilities.”

“after Policenauts I came to the conclusion that controlling everything myself wasn't necessarily a good thing. Because if everything has to ultimately pass through me, then my abilities—and limitations—become a bottleneck.”

“But the sense of identity a player has with their avatar in an action game is something amazing. It's really what video games are all about.”

“So we game creators are not "artists". [...] the interactive experience of the user comes first. Games are also tools—something to be used. They don't gain acceptance until they are used; artistic self-indulgence won't do. [...] it's important to realize that a game isn't a painting. No one wants a knife that won't cut, right?”

“From the beginning, I've always been very influenced by foreign films, books, and music. Having consumed all that media, and believing I've grown as a person myself, to see Metal Gear Solid praised by people overseas, it felt like I'd repaid that debt.”

“More than imitating movies directly, I would say it's that I try to recreate scenes in a cinematic way.”

“When Kojima first announces something, everyone thinks he's joking. But then he starts making it just as he said and we realize after the fact, "oh, he was serious." (laughs) [...] If you leave him to his devices though he'll actually do the crazy stuff he says.”

“among the preliminary sketches I drew, one of them looked like a dinosaur, and Kojima did single that one out. "Let's go with this."”

According to the Newsweek profile of him in 2001, Kojima wrote in middle school five 600-page science-fiction novels.

According to Newsweek, Kojima got into filmmaking when a friend brought a Super 8 camera to school, and he charged neighborhood kids 50 yen each to see his movies.

“I thought I would be like Sylvester Stallone with 'Rocky'. I would write something great and make it into a movie myself.”

Newsweek reported in 2001 that Kojima, as a child, played outdoor games like thief-and-detective — the Japanese equivalent of hide-and-seek — with his friends, flattening himself against walls and peeking around corners much as Solid Snake does.

“A game takes away 20 hours of your life or more. I like to add something to a game that is more than just a tool to kill time with.”

“We use wind, rain, steam and other effects to make the players feel as though they're really there. It may look like a film, but it doesn't play like a film--it's more of an event.”

In 2003 Kojima produced and designed Boktai (Game Boy Advance), whose cartridge included a photometric light sensor; to charge the game's solar weapon the player had to take the Game Boy Advance outside into real daylight, which compelled playing outdoors and during the day.

“This has been important to me, because Konami has often told me my ideas are too crazy, and there's been dark times where the warm letters I receive from fans were all that sustained me.”

“I actually had wanted to include a sensor that measured how your breath smelled too! I *really* wanted to add that! The enemies are vampires, right? So if you ate something garlic-y and breathed on the mic, they'd all die. (laughs) [...] "Guys, we have to do this!!" But the rest of the staff all hated the idea.”

“The feel of the controls. That's everything. Whether it's fun to move around in the game or not. You can talk about an idea until you're blue in the face, but I think what matters most is whether it actually feels good to play.”

“In my generation, we didn't have good role models; no one taught us anything. [...] That's why we ended up learning a lot from movies and manga. For the current generation, I think games are fulfilling a similar role. [...] People tell me all the time that my games are too "preachy", but I don't like games that have nothing to teach. (laughs)”

“You can't ultimately win against that void of nothingness that is space—victory's just not in the cards. And yet still he fights. I think this is actually a pattern that re-appears in all my games, the concept of a battle that's a lost cause. (laughs)”

“I would like to go. Not to Mars, but to the surface of the moon. Just getting out of Earth's orbit, and seeing our Earth from up there… I could die happy. Seriously, I wouldn't care if I couldn't come back.”

“There was a period, before my Father died, where I thought I'd become an artist, but my Father died very suddenly when I was 13. My family was full of artists, you see, and they hadn't been able to make a living off of it.”

“The key to all of it, is the live element. Video games are a form of media in which the developer tries to create an experience that will bring joy to the player. [...] But in doing so there's an element of compulsion, of the player merely re-tracing the path the developer has laid out in advance for them.”

“Ultimately, I feel the game design part of the development should be done by the game designers. If I start tinkering with the work they've done it would be weird. [...] it would be like punching holes in the foundation of a building. "This column looks funky—take it out!" And then the whole thing collapses.”

“Take the equation "1 + 1 = 2". For me, if the answer is 2, then "3 – 1 = 2" is just as valid.”

“If I direct the same team, it will only lead to the same game being made.”

“I took some shots at my companion Leo, and he went "Dingo, I'm your ally!" (laughs)”

“[whenever] I travel and stay at a hotel I put the TV on as soon as I enter the room, just to deal with the feeling of loneliness”

“I've said over the years in interviews throughout the world, "Just like the human body is 70% water, I'm 70% film". While this is a figure of speech, there is some truth to it. I learned, or rather was taught, much from film, including things I didn't learn in school or from my parents.”

“It resonated with me, given the loneliness that troubled me in my younger days, which is why it has a very special place in my heart. After I saw it I bought a jacket and a pair of boots to copy Robert De Niro. Needless to say, I did not get a mohawk.”

“This was the first film I went to see at a movie theater by myself, at the OS Theater in Osaka. I have a lot of memories of this film.”

“It instantly made me a fan of Diane Lane. There was a time when I would watch its ending every morning.”

“My goal is to make a player think, 'I want to reenter this world of lies tomorrow.'”

“Let your readers know that I'm married, with a son. Put that in boldface, all caps.”

Kojima said loneliness had accompanied him since childhood and reached its worst during his adolescence, even when he was surrounded by family, friends, school and activities. He described how a switch could flip in the middle of having fun, making the feeling stronger the more numerous the crowd was; at the end of the year, when the city was liveliest, he spent sleepless nights fearing that the loneliness might one day kill him.

As a child of working parents, Kojima wore his house key on a cord around his neck like a dog tag; it annoyed him when he did somersaults on the horizontal bar, but he wore it at all times. No one ever picked him up from school—even in rain, during a typhoon, or when he was sick—so he would unlock and enter an empty house, turn on the lights and the air conditioner or heater, and sometimes cry at his mother’s vanity or wander the streets to delay coming home.

Taxi Driver did not teach Kojima to defeat his loneliness but to live with it, because it showed him that someone else could feel the same way. Decades later he believed that that emotional sickness had vanished around the birth of his first child and when he began making video games: upon realizing his works connected him with faceless, nameless players around the world, the loneliness fell away definitively.

Every time Kojima got into a taxi, he looked at the driver’s name on their ID as if somewhere he were still searching for Travis Bickle. He never found that name in real life, but he wished that someday he could sit in the rear seat and thank Travis Bickle because, unlike the movie’s rescue of fourteen-year-old Iris, Travis had pulled Kojima out of his isolation.

At 43, Kojima ranked his three vital cultural nutrients as movies, music, and novels. His father loved movies, so Kojima was made to absorb films from the time he began forming memories, and music came along with those viewings; by contrast, although the family home was filled with books and his parents placed children's classics on his desk to tempt him, he still did not read even by the end of elementary school.

In 1974 Kojima attended a tutoring school in another city more for the adventure of the commute than for studying. One rainy day he took shelter in a bookstore in Ikeda, and the large cover of the novelization Columbo: Publish or Perish, which contained black-and-white photographs inside, led him to buy with his allowance the first book he had chosen out of his own interest. He used each photograph, appearing about every twenty pages, like a breath of air and read all 261 pages in one sitting.

After Publish or Perish, Kojima began slipping away alone to the bookstore opposite the tutoring school and felt that spending time among the books meant he had entered the adult world. He awaited each monthly Columbo novelization and went to the bookstore weekly even when no new book had come out, to the point of wondering whether he was really attending the tutoring school or the shop. There he discovered Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, which opened the way to mysteries, science fiction, adventure, and his future profession.

Since 2005 Kojima presented his own program on the official Kojima Productions blog, "HIDECHAN! ラジオ", which was published in numbered installments; on July 3, 2007 it was at episode 148, and the blog’s archived version in July 2011 shows episode 296 and a monthly archive beginning in September 2005. Kojima is credited as responsible for the program’s script and structure alongside Takaaki Kitamura.

In his blog entry of July 3, 2007, in a fixed section titled «las películas que ha visto últimamente el director Kojima», Kojima lists three films: Transformers, directed by Michael Bay and produced by Steven Spielberg; Soy un cyborg, directed by Park Chan-wook; and La jungla 4.0, directed by Len Wiseman.

In Kojima's blog entry dated July 3, 2007, the DVD section lists a copy of Soy un cyborg signed by its director Park Chan-wook.

In his blog entry of July 3, 2007, Kojima listed in the books section Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, the Kobunsha edition.

The official biographical profile Konami published on its blog presented Kojima, besides as creator of Metal Gear, Snatcher, Policenauts and Metal Gear Solid, as one of the video game industry’s leading film buffs and noted that he also worked as a commentator and wrote film reviews.

Kojima saw his first foreign movie at age three, not in a theater but via the analog TV signal in his tatami‑matted living room thanks to Sunday Foreign Movie Theatre; he identified his first Japanese movies as the double feature Gamera vs. Barugon and Daimajin. Those Western film broadcasts came before home video, satellite, and cable.

With no VCR to pause the broadcast, Kojima, his brother and his father finished dinner and their baths before the nine o’clock showing, watched attentively without popcorn or candy, and sprinted during the commercials to be the first to get to the bathroom, sometimes following prearranged turns. Kojima did not know that Nagaharu Yodogawa’s commentaries were prerecorded and imagined the presenter was also waiting for the commercial break to go and stand at the toilet.

Kojima credited much of his film education to commentators like Nagaharu Yodogawa: their explanations made difficult or foreign films digestible, and their reassuring presence felt as if they were watching the films alongside the child. He distinguished commentators from critics with a culinary metaphor — commentators explain the ingredients and the chef before you eat, rather than dictating the taste — and concluded that, after that figure disappeared, he wanted to become an evangelist for different eras and cultures.

Kojima regarded the primary family form as a unit of four: his parents, his brother two years older, and himself. After moving from Tokyo toward Kansai, his parents built a house in 1970 in a new development in Hyogo, distant from grandparents and other relatives; Kojima’s father presented that house as where they were starting and from which their children could also begin. They did not have the typical suburban dog because Kojima’s mother had asthma.

Having little contact with large real-life families, Kojima looked for models through television. As a child he was struck by the constant affection and kisses of the married couple in Bewitched and wanted a family like theirs; after losing his father, he admired Charles Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie—loving, dignified, hardworking, and protective even in poverty—and moved from wishing for a father like that to wanting to become that kind of father.

In 2001 Kojima went on a whim with his young son to see Crayon Shin-Chan: The Fierceness That Invites the Storm! The Adult Empire Strikes Back and became hooked on the Nohara family from Shin Chan, whose ability to band together in a crisis struck him as a new model of Japanese family. After the birth of his second son his own family grew from three to four, but he admitted he was still not the ideal father: he might have reached the level of the workaholic Hiroshi, while Charles Ingalls remained beyond his reach; he wanted his children to be inspired by their real-life family rather than by television idols.

Kojima placed his first love at age four in Anne Yuri, the only female member of the Ultra Guard in Ultraseven. A promotional photograph—which was not an actual scene from the episode—showed her brushing her hair unaware of an alien standing behind her; Kojima wanted to warn her, but also blushed and felt heat without understanding why. In the series finale he cried more at the thought of never seeing Anne again than at the hero’s departure or the end of the show.

Kojima bought the 2005 DVD release of Bohachi Bushido but could not finish it because seeing Yuriko Hishimi naked conflicted with the image of Anne he had built up from his childhood crush. A 1997 book, A Letter to Anne, finally allowed him to look at nude photographs and accept that the character Anne and the actress Yuriko Hishimi were part of the same first love; from that point on he began to say this openly in interviews.

Upon learning that Yuriko Hishimi would attend the premiere of a Mamoru Oshii film, Kojima wrote to Kenji Kamiyama pleading that he introduce him to her. Onstage at the premiere, Oshii confessed through a megaphone his own youthful love for Anne, and Kojima felt relieved, as if Oshii were speaking for him; although Kojima did not get to speak with Hishimi backstage, after forty years he saw his first love as a real woman, and at age forty-four he wrote the essay as the love letter he should have mailed forty years earlier.

As a child, Kojima avoided weekly manga magazines because he hated their cheap paper and the red, green, orange, or yellow tints; he was especially repulsed by battered, discolored, finger‑smudged copies left in barbers, eateries, and hospital waiting rooms. He preferred to wait months to buy the single‑volume editions (tankobon), which were revised, neatly bound, and intended for permanent collection, and he said he maintained that preference into upper‑middle age.

Kojima said he could still draw Bakabon’s dad with his eyes closed. In junior high he filled the margins of his textbooks and notes with Maetel from Galaxy Express 999. In senior high he traced Cobra on the cover so many times that the edges of the tankobon turned black from the graphite of his pencil.

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.

Kojima admired that Yukinobu Hoshino continued to produce ambitious, art- and philosophy-driven serialized stories even after moving from a mass-circulation weekly magazine to a small monthly one. He saw himself in Hoshino because, at that time and in the shadow of the Famicom boom, Kojima was also making video games for a minor platform. Years later he continued to question whether Japanese-made games could stop placing market priority first and make the same cultural leap that manga had achieved.

Kojima placed Blade Runner among his top ten favorite films and said that if he had not encountered it he would not be who he is today. He watched it in 1982, during his first year of college, alone in a conspicuously empty auditorium in Umeda; the film flattened him not so much for its plot as for the sensation of a vital future in which technology, fashion, billboards, accessories and cultures from different times and countries coexisted in harmony. He wanted to live in that city.

For Blade Runner’s 25th anniversary, Kojima made a personal festival: he bought the five‑DVD set, a three‑CD anniversary soundtrack, a making‑of book, and reread the novel. Although immersed in Metal Gear Solid 4, he made time to see the Final Cut; he asked for one ticket for “BlaRun” and the ticket seller did not understand the nickname. After an unusually silent exit from the screening, he found other viewers gathered in the lobby before the display photos, talking enthusiastically; sharing the film in a theater with strangers who loved it was, for him, the true Final Cut.

After leaving that screening into the warm rain of Shinjuku, Kojima saw skyscrapers and neon signs in various languages, heard sirens and foreign voices, and for a moment felt he was in the Los Angeles of 2019 imagined by Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott. He said he smelled Blade Runner in the air, touched it in the city, and felt it on his skin and in the warmth of a puddle.

Kojima's father, who had survived the Great Tokyo Air Raid and as a boy had wanted to join the navy, drank and built model ships; the family's bathroom "dry dock" held many wrecked Yamato models. Seeing the title on the TV listings, he forced Hideo to watch the premiere broadcast of Space Battleship Yamato on October 6, 1974, but the boy found it boring and from the following week secretly switched the channel to Army of the Apes; only the reruns shown at dinnertime later turned him into a fan.

The first screening of the Yamato movie in Tokyo fell on August 7, 1977, the day of Kojima’s father’s funeral. While handling related paperwork in Umeda with his mother, Kojima bought a presale movie ticket that included a poster and put up Starsha’s image on his bedroom wall. On the day Yamato opened in Kansai he took the first train, waited for hours in the sun in a very long line, and watched probably the third showing in a packed, fetid auditorium. There, for the first time since his father’s death, he was able to process the loss of the man who loved the Yamato.

Kojima said he continued to pursue dreams and roman —aspirations for heroism, adventure and lofty ideals— even though they are not attainable objects, because the goal keeps a person alive. When he was about to lose them or give up, he would sing the verse about the scarlet scarf from Yamato’s ending song; then he imagined the ship sailing into the black sea of space and regained courage.

Kojima always answered Joy Division when asked his favorite band and Closer when asked which album was most important. He listened to the band when life or work got him down, but also on sunny days—not to cheer up or relieve stress, but to enter their melancholy, reaffirm his place in the face of loneliness and death, and return to an inner, tranquil space he considered his bedrock.

Kojima encountered Joy Division after Ian Curtis’s death, probably around 1983, prompted by a line in the Japanese liner notes to the first Tears for Fears album. This timing coincided with the Japanese success of New Order’s “Blue Monday,” and he bought Japanese editions of Joy Division LPs and twelve-inch singles; paradoxically, he did not become genuinely interested in New Order until their album Low-Life in 1985.

Kojima described his college years as a dark period in which he could not let go of his dream of making films nor find his break, and had no one to turn to for advice or to talk to. He chose to converse through his work with two young people who had died by suicide, Ian Curtis and the writer Etsuko Takano, rather than with living people who did not understand him; he called Joy Division his silent confidant and said they helped him hang on to life and saved his life.

The premiere of Control turned the city, for Kojima, into a Joy Division festival. He bought the soundtrack and Paul Smith T-shirts, several photobooks, remastered reissues, compilations and rarities; thanks to contacts at Konami’s London branch he also secured two UK-exclusive editions. Seeing posters, shops and cinemas full of the lost band felt like a day he had never imagined, and he expressed the desire to visit Ian Curtis’s grave someday.

“So I deliberately kind of matched myself and Old Snake. This is not just the message to the users, but also a message to the internal development staff as well; we've all been working for quite a long time, and I wanted to show that Hideo Kojima, at 45, still working in the spotlight - I wanted to show that to the staff!”

“I wanted the users to almost overlap their experience - to say, "I aged, Snake aged" - I wanted to express this feeling in MGS4.”

“when I say as a creator, "I want to create this new game", it's still the same as twenty years ago! People still ask, "will that sell, will that be good?" Nobody really understands whether it would be an instant hit or whatever - I'm not just talking about the top executives, but even the development staff!”

“And if I get more 'boos' about it - if they say, "no - we don't know what you're talking about!" then this is actually the fun part.”

“But it's like when Hayao Miyazaki says he is not going to do more, and then always ends up doing it. I think I am kind of in a similar situation; I have ideas other than Metal Gear, and I want to go on to make other new games, but for political, business or technology reasons, there is always a time when I have to return.”

“But I have to say, my feeling hasn't changed; I would like to pass on the Metal Gear series to younger staff members, and then go on to produce the title, and not be so attached to it.”

“I always want to be in a creative position, where I can concentrate and grow as a creator. I feel if I don't do that, I might as well not be in the industry.”

“And in my spare time I want to establish a new game, which I have been wanting to do for a long time. I do have strong urges to create a new title other than the Metal Gear series.”

“But the thing that I am trying to work out right now is an idea that I had ten years ago, which I am still worried on the technical side whether it's possible or not even today.”

“Well that 'raw game' concept is basically just one of the ideas I had back then, meaning combinations could always apply when creating video games; I could take that idea and other ideas that I've had, and make it into one game.”

“But I only wanted to make MGS4 a window to this; the next step - where you open the window and look at the real world - that's up to the users! I didn't want to exaggerate just to make my story glitter or get coverage on the news, that was not my intention.”

“Gameplay is always fundamental. Halo, BioShock - I see their approach and I think they are brilliant in some ways, but I still feel they still lack a kind of a deeper storyline or the expression of the feelings of the characters.”

“In MGS4, yes, I put everything in the cut sequences, which I kind of regret to some extent, because maybe there is a new approach which I should think about.”

“if I make multiple storylines and allow the users to select which story, this might really sacrifice the deep emotion the user might feel; when there's a concrete storyline, and you kind of go along that rail, you feel the destiny of the story, which at the end, makes you feel more moved.”

“I played Killzone 2 this morning, actually, and it was funny because the FPS control was traditional FPS, but when you come to a door and have to kind of open the latch, you all of a sudden have to use the Sixaxis, and nobody was succeeding.”

“when you design a game, you have to target who you want to target. And you design knowing which target to approach, and that's the key.”

Kojima described his father as a chemist involved in the development of new medicines who, within the corporate structure, was nevertheless a salaryman enduring crowded trains, conflicts with coworkers and persistent fatigue while continuing to work, and who finally managed to buy a house in a Kansai suburb. In that newly created town with no shared past, families and children measured one another by academic background and job title as if playing a card game; Kojima rebelled by choosing the then-young video game industry, where he believed titles weren’t necessary and only a person’s ability mattered.

In 1993, seven years after joining Konami and at age thirty, Kojima was made associate general manager of Development Group 5, a team of fewer than ten people with few sales. In addition to game design he now handled personnel, administration and budgeting—tasks he was doing for the first time. When he came across Section Chief Kosaku Shima again in a bookstore, Kojima saw in that character a secret support for worries he did not want to show and for the loneliness of being caught between the organization and his work.

In 2008 Kojima’s business card listed “Creative Officer, Konami Digital Entertainment” and “Director, Kojima Productions.” He argued that job titles don’t hire people, don’t make anything, don’t create profits and do not endure, and that he wanted to be remembered for his deeds and his name rather than any position; he intended to spend the rest of his life on his personal mission, not a title. When exchanging business cards he introduced himself simply as Hideo Kojima, a game designer.

“I will not retire. I will continue to create games as long as I live.”

Kojima called 2001: A Space Odyssey his all-time number-one favorite movie and said it was the only human-made work he would choose as perfect if he had to name one. For years he consciously avoided speaking publicly about the film because it was so immense and personal to him; he regarded living without knowing it as like closing the door to one’s own evolution and future.

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.

Although he was Kojima’s biggest fan, he refused for years to buy 2001 on VHS, LaserDisc or DVD, believing that a work of such gigantic scale should not be paused, fast-forwarded or rewound for personal convenience. He yielded to a two-disc special edition, watched the making-of and listened to the audio commentary, and regretted it when he received explanations and interpretations from the creators; he said he did not need a talking monolith and left the DVD case closed ever since.

As a teenager, Kojima used science-fiction years—1984, 1997 and finally 2001—as future milestones that reality turned into the past. When 2001 arrived he discovered the film still belonged to the future and said his internal clock would remain stopped there until the world reached its perfection and creators managed to surpass it; for him the film was the monolith placed in the path by a god named Kubrick.

When asked where the sun rises, Kojima would sing the theme song of The Genius Bakabon, which incorrectly says the sun rises in the west, and he would give the opposite answer. He was attracted to the song for more than its mnemonic value: after asserting a blatant falsehood the chorus offers reassurance that everything will be all right, a rebellious spirit that sounded to him like upbeat rock music.

Kojima named Fujio Akatsuka as his definitive comedy mentor and the unquestionable foundation of his humor, above cinematic or stage influences. He valued that manga let him, when feeling down, laugh alone at his own pace—a small, introspective laughter that healed life’s wounds, led to the next day, and affirmed that he was alive.

As a child Kojima’s family nicknamed him “Dekoppachi” because his forehead was prominent like Ataro’s younger brother; he did not entirely like the nickname but did not hate it either. He went on to draw Akatsuka’s characters everywhere, and from around third grade he drew Bakabon’s dad repeatedly—in notebooks, textbooks, his diary, on desks and on school walls; he learned to draw the character with his eyes closed, continued adding the dad to some autograph boards, and believed it was the character he had drawn more times than any other.

As head of a household, as a father, and as a person, Kojima aspired to be Akatsuka’s alter ego—Bakabon’s dad. He had already passed Bakabon’s dad’s age of forty-one and still felt unworthy of inheriting the name of “fool”: he wanted to reach a bare self in which genius and fool would no longer be opposites and where he could answer the world’s contradictions with the character’s “It’ll be fine.”

When the first Walkman appeared, Kojima was in the first year of high school, lived in a household headed by his mother, and could not afford one. Two years later a classmate lent him a Walkman in class; on hearing "Habana Express" by Akira Terao he felt the voice inside his body, a three‑dimensional sound that enveloped him and seemed to filter into his sight, leaving him speechless, though he could only aspire to buy one someday.

Kojima even used the Walkman at home because he needed private music for any activity. He pushed each player so hard that, on average, he wore one out every two to three years and replaced it; along the way he also cheated on Sony with Aiwa and Panasonic.

Kojima wrote that the various incarnations of the Walkman had supported him through half of his life: during heartbreak, despair, mistakes, sickness, low spirits, loss, fear of dying, pressure, stress, feelings of failure, and creative drought. He summarized that companionship as two people walking together with three legs between them.

Although he remained attached to MiniDisc after the iPod’s release, Kojima bought a 6 GB iPod mini in 2005. For Christmas 2007 he gave his son his first iPod, a nano, and impulsively bought himself an iPod classic 120 GB, his third iPod after an iPod 5.5.

Kojima interpreted the convergence of phone, player, console and computer as a shift from the liberation of music to carrying a “walking house” that holds entertainment, data and identity. He warned that this movable shell makes it possible to isolate oneself from society anywhere and removes the pleasure of choosing a single object to take. Despite that concern, he acknowledged that he still puts in his earbuds and walks inside his own shell.

“There were a lot of surprises - the way the Western developers do things are so different! What I'm thinking now is, OK, we need to be a global studio.”

“You know, we've been asked this a lot - how do you guys know this? Even my wife didn't know!”

“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.”

“I think in the near future, it will be increasingly like the Hollywood model - there might be a person who will fund, and a person who is the creator.”

“But I think I have a different role in the current market than making those kinds of titles; my role is to constantly pursue new ideas and new technology. I feel fine doing that as well, so I think I should leave the creation of retro-styled titles to others.”

“Not really! Recently, Kojima Productions was involved in the creation of a foreign currency trading game - so I guess that kind of counts!”

“There's kind of a unique system where we learn many different parts of economics, marketing, or other things... English too, or even a third language - I studied Spanish.”

“I had the idea of bringing the game to the iPhone originally, but I wasn't the designer of the game. I was more of a producer, guiding the team members.”

“For MGS4, or any other Metal Gear game, I always tend to draw on something that seems to be a 'threat' to society in the near future - maybe one or two years from the present time.”

“For MGS3 though, perhaps for the younger audience that didn't live through the 60s, I guess it seems more fantasy-like to them. But for me and others who grew up during that time period, I think we could relate it to the things that happened during that time period.”

“I think creating that now wouldn't really be 'cool' [laughs]. I'm not saying that I shouldn't do it, but I think that I probably won't.”

“Personally, though, I would like to do smaller projects, but when I think of the time I have left living on this earth, I would rather spend that on bigger things!”

“Sure, there is definitely pressure. We don't belong wholly to Konami, so that pressure might be lighter, but since Kojima Productions is a part of Konami and Konami does the business side of things, yeah, I feel pressure there, that there's a need for it to be a successful, ongoing series.”

“It would still be a hide-and-seek game, but I would create tension by adding a story to go with it.”

“I saw the future. If it weren't for Miyamoto-san I wouldn't be where I am.”

“It ended up being more like a puzzle action game.”

“Inside the park you can't separate yourself from the fantasy. At Disneyland you never go 'backstage'—even when you're in the bathroom.”

“Games shouldn't only be fun. They should teach or spark an interest in other things.”

“I won't make games with senseless violence. There has to be a reason for it, such as war.”

“Making a game is very similar to making a movie. It would be ideal if I could spend two years on a game and then the next two on a movie.”

In 2009 Kojima wrote that if he could have only one wish it would be to go into space before he dies. He said a brief orbit just beyond Earth’s atmosphere would be enough, and that to make it happen he would give up even his position as a game designer, his family, or his own life.

The Apollo 11 moon landing was the event that had the greatest impact on Kojima and gave him courage and hope. He also recalled the Apollo–Soyuz docking in 1975: watching on television the American and Soviet crews shake hands during the Cold War seemed to him the moment when science changed human prejudices, and he said it moved him more deeply than the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Kojima’s aspiration to become an astronaut turned him into an obsessive science enthusiast: he spent his meager allowance on Newton and the Japanese edition of Omni, watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and live broadcasts of space missions—which he prioritized even above his favorite movies—and studied biology, chemistry, and geology to prepare. He said he was hopeless at math and that those magazines and TV shows excited him more than Playboy or the late-night program 11PM.

Kojima abandoned the idea of becoming a professional astronaut almost upon entering senior high: Japan’s space agency had no astronauts, becoming a cosmonaut on the other side of the Iron Curtain seemed impossible, and NASA required U.S. citizenship which he was not going to change. He later judged those to be simplistic excuses to force himself to grow up; he did not abandon the desire to travel to space and, as a college student, carried Takashi Tachibana’s Return from Space in his pocket.

When journalist Toyohiro Akiyama traveled to space in 1990 with funding from TBS and Soviet technology, Kojima realized a civilian route existed and reacted with frustration and jealousy for not having imagined it. This made him understand that he did not simply want to reach space but to train and go as an astronaut; for that reason he did not feel the same envy when game designer Richard Garriott paid about $30 million to travel to the International Space Station in 2008.

Kojima held that the deeper reason for going to space was not weightlessness, extraterrestrials, danger, or a special experience, but to find out who we are and what our place is. He described the journey to space as a journey to know oneself and the return to Earth as the passage from the past self to the future self; he concluded by asking where he himself would return as a game designer.

“I first met Ishii this year, but I knew about him a long time previous. I get told by people that there are only three guys in Japan who like adventures: me, Ishii and Shu Takumi.”

“We're both pretty close to each other in that the movie business has been near and dear to our hearts. The only difference is that he's been able to keep making adventures this whole time.”

“It took me a year and a half to get half of Snatcher done; I had six chapters planned out and they told me to cut it down to two!”

“Snatcher was pretty much the same way; there's a ton of references in the game that sort of skirt copyright laws. I never worried about that back then, because doing what I liked in games -- an interactive form of media -- was in itself a new thing for me.”

“Ourselves, we're like the people who made their own films before making it big in Hollywood. I think we've got the skills we need to make anything we want, anywhere we want, on any budget we want. That's where my pride, or my confidence, comes from.”

“This point isn't limited to the game business, but if we don't have an environment where developers can make what they want and find an audience for it, then I think it's all going to come crashing down.”

On seeing a newly installed mailbox in his neighborhood, Kojima pictured it as a red figure with its analog mouth open and a very hungry belly, standing there under rain and wind waiting for letters. He posted that image and the question of when he had last written or received a letter on Twitter and repeated the same message in the first essay of the My Lovable Memes series, calling the crossing of the digital tweet and the analog magazine a little piece of mischief.

Kojima said he loved the work of Teru Miyamoto and had read his novels exhaustively during his adolescence. While seeking escape in fanciful translated books, those novels helped him come to terms with his real, true-to-life self; he placed Kinshu as his favorite, followed by Haru no Yume and Ao ga Chiru.

Kojima defended the letter precisely because of its limitations: it is unidirectional, arrives with a delay, does not allow control over when or under what circumstances it is read, and cannot be deleted or edited after being sent. He considered that this medium, prone to misunderstandings, forces sender and receiver to move toward each other from opposite ends and strengthens empathy and the understanding of shared emotions.

Kojima proposed writing a letter even without sending it, without a stamp, without showing it to anyone, and even without a specific addressee. He thought the exercise could bring back a forgotten memory or reveal something unexpected about the writer.

Kojima placed Kobo Abe among the authors who influenced him most and ranked The Woman in the Dunes among his top three Abe novels alongside The Face of Another and The Box Man. He was drawn to how Abe revealed contemporary society and human nature through science fiction, fable, and metaphor; Kojima associated narrative holes with awe, fear of the unknown, and even a basic arousal.

Kojima recalled an idea he attributed to Ryu Murakami: that every story presents a protagonist who falls into a hole and either crawls out or dies inside. He found it applicable to nearly all tales, but saw in The Woman in the Dunes a third possibility that revealed Abe’s genius: the protagonist finds a life inside the hole.

From The Woman in the Dunes, Kojima held that in life there are pits imposed on us and others we build ourselves, and that leaving one may simply lead to another. He proposed seeking a purpose within the current pit: there is freedom to leave, to stay, and to choose to live there, so the definition of freedom changes with one's thinking and point of view.

During the 2010 world tour for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Kojima was trapped with twelve other people (thirteen total) in a freight elevator at Uniqlo Soho in New York City. They managed to open the elevator doors with their bare hands and found only the metal wall of the shaft because the car had stopped between floors; as people began pounding on the cabin the smell of panic spread and there was fear of running out of oxygen, and Kojima found himself thinking of elevator movies. An hour later a rescue team evacuated them by ladder through the top of the elevator car, and they escaped without injury.

Kojima’s first memory associated with an elevator is not an actual ride but a black-and-white image: when he was in preschool his father made him watch Elevator to the Gallows on television. Because there were few high-rises then and he may not yet have ridden in an elevator, the film’s immorality and mystery lodged more strongly in him than any physical memory of the device.

After returning to Japan following the freight-elevator incident, Kojima bought the DVD of Elevator to the Gallows and watched it for the first time in about forty years. The film proved different from his childhood impressions: he felt sympathy for Jeanne Moreau and realized it was not film noir to him but a hymn to love. He concluded that he had been trapped inside that movie for decades and that the real elevator accident had set in motion again the elevator that had long stood still in his heart.

Kojima went with his teenage son, a Hanshin Tigers fan, to a Giants–Tigers game; Kojima drank beer and his son drank orange juice, and although Kojima was not interested in baseball he used the pauses in the game to ask about and listen to his son’s life, considering those conversations their version of a father–son game of catch.

Kojima recalled that when his son was small they did all kinds of activities and trips together, but that abruptly ended when his son started junior high and preferred to be with his friends. Since Kojima's own father died when he was thirteen and he had no experience of going through adolescence with a father, he said he did not know what closeness or distance to adopt with his son; he sought guidance by rereading Early Autumn.

Comparing his fathering to Early Autumn, Kojima admitted he could not teach his children carpentry, boxing, and cooking like Spenser. He drew from the novel that one can only teach the things one knows how to do, the world one has seen, and one’s own way of living; yet he believed that the exchange of teaching and learning broadens the future and that conveying confidence can connect children with their destiny.

The Giants–Tigers game ended 9–1 and Kojima’s elder son returned home silent from the loss; this time Kojima filled the walk home with stories about his own life. Afterwards he played ball for the first time in a park with his second son, who had just turned four, and he saw that summer as the simultaneous beginning of two distinct family seasons.

Kojima encountered North Face by chance in 2010 when he saw its trailer at an arthouse theater in Ginza. He said the film left a stronger impression on him than any other, praised its restrained camerawork, CG, and direction, and wrote that its documentary blend of humanity, nature, drama, and politics pierced his heart like a climbing piton.

Kojima admired that North Face shifted genres like mountain weather: what first appears to be a war movie becomes a mountaineering film, then a satire of the press, and finally a disaster movie. He emphasized a material contrast: the climbers quit the alpine infantry, assemble homemade equipment and bicycle the entire 700 kilometers because they could not afford train tickets, while the journalists arrive as tourists, dine in formal wear in an opulent heated hotel and watch through telescopes those who sleep in a tent and sip barley soup amid the storm.

North Face made Kojima want to look away and run because of the physical weight of the tragedy, but he felt he had to keep watching because it had really happened. Still, he saw that the film prepared a traverse beyond the disaster: the account of a deadly ascent ultimately became a work about love and about the person one promises to return to.

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.

Kojima recalled that, after he had stopped reading science fiction, he one day found Inherit the Stars in a bookstore and felt reunited with the science fiction of his youth. In the same essay he said the release of Moon in spring 2010 gave him a sense of déjà vu and prompted him to take James P. Hogan's novel down from his library.

Kojima interpreted the new generation of science fiction writers — including Project Itoh and Tow Ubukata — as heirs to the memes of a once-dormant SF. Relating this to Inherit the Stars, he placed the answer to the novel’s theme of inheritance in the generations of readers able to receive and demonstrate those memes, rather than in the book’s celestial locations.

Kojima said that as a child he did not read and that he rejected reading without having tried it. In fifth grade he picked up Murder on the Orient Express because there was a film adaptation and he only wanted to see what the book was like; the novel struck him, sparked his curiosity, and led him to read almost all the Agatha Christie he could find before reaching middle school.

In 2010, a display in a bookstore marking the 120th anniversary of Agatha Christie’s birth re-hooked Kojima and led him to reread her major novels to find out what had fascinated him as a child.

If he had to preserve a single Agatha Christie novel, Kojima would choose And Then There Were None. He admired that a locked-room mystery in which everyone dies could work and that its premise, its misdirections and its final twist still surprised contemporary readers.

Kojima compared Christie’s novels to quiz shows and video games: brisk reads of precise length and density that focus on dilemma and deceit rather than leaving a depressive social or emotional burden. He argued that, as with action or puzzle games, readers learn her patterns with practice and engage in an intellectual contest with the author, though Christie will defeat them again if they become complacent.

Kojima ended his recommendation of And Then There Were None with a joke: he claimed there were eleven victims, not ten, because after “there were none” Christie killed another person — the reader — with her charm. He named himself as that victim and concluded that the Kojima who hated books had thus disappeared.

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.

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.

Kojima recognized in himself a tendency to seek isolation, but Tout Seul made him realize he had not even taken the first step to leave his tower. Knowing that elsewhere there were people who shared the same loneliness taught him to address his own not by fighting the outside world but by parting with the comfort of being alone; when lonely people gather, he said, the word solitude disappears.

In high school, a line from The Moon over the Mountain left Kojima dumbstruck; until then he had boasted of reading only foreign science fiction and mysteries. He reread the story aloud in class, at home, and wherever he could until he memorized it completely; for years he proudly assumed no one else had done the same, until he later learned that the writer Koji Yanagi had also memorized it during his student days.

Kojima placed the start of his deliberate narrative writing in junior high, when a teacher assigned converting a few lines of kanbun into modern Japanese and expanding them into a story. He reinterpreted those lines into roughly ten pages, received special praise from the teacher in front of the class, and shifted from merely documenting plots like movie synopses to trying to write real narratives.

After he began writing, Kojima had no mentor, isolated himself, and nurtured a sense of superiority while producing stories that were not published. Upon entering senior high he continued writing but stopped submitting his work to competitions; he recognized in the poet Li Zheng the same mix of timid pride and disdainful shyness—that is, a fear that a lack of talent might be revealed and a rejection of the effort required to cultivate it.

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.

For Kojima, the image of a train is the maroon Hankyu carriage running through the mountain valleys of Kansai. From his childhood moves through cram school, regular school, leisure, dates, movies, shopping, trips, New Year’s shrine visits, trips to the airport, work, and returning home, the Hankyu network accompanied roughly half his life, and its maroon color became associated with his youth.

Kojima bought Hankyu Densha solely for its cover and title. He began reading it propelled by railway nostalgia, became caught by the book’s gentle, almost maternal wistfulness, and joked that he finished it at express-train speed.

In February 2011, Kojima detoured from a business trip to visit his father’s grave near his old house and rode the Hankyu Railway for the first time in a year. He did not know anyone on the train; the view outside had changed greatly since he had lived there and the train car’s interior had been modernized, but the cozy, cradle-like sway felt nostalgic. He described the Hankyu not merely as transportation but as a time machine to his hometown and his memories.

Kojima had planned to dedicate his essay to a different Minato Shukawa story, but the Tohoku earthquake of March 11, 2011 changed his choice. While looking through the heap of books that had fallen from his bookshelves he found Orgel and read it, wondering how survivors should respond and go on living after the disaster.

Through Orgel’s journey to sites tied to earthquakes, accidents, and war, Kojima argued that some losses must be seen, remembered, and listened to so the dead are not consigned to the past. After Tohoku he presented that listening as an individual responsibility: even if a meme reaches only one person, that person should receive it and pass it on to help build a bridge to the future.

When Kojima was still a student who paid almost exclusive attention to Western novels, Shibumi, written by the American Trevanian, introduced him to the ancient Japanese concept of shibumi. He did not aspire merely to be a man with that suave, detached elegance, but to master it completely.

When Kojima reread Shibumi in 2006 as part of his research for Metal Gear Solid 4, he was startled by parallels with ideas he had already used: a combat discipline similar to CQC, the heightened threat perception he learned in scout/tracking training, and the merciful murder of a parental figure, which he related to Big Boss and The Boss. His reappraisal led him to recommend the novel to the development team.

As a fan of Shibumi, Kojima opened Satori, the prequel written by Don Winslow, with unease. The first two pages —a maple leaf and the recollection of killing a father-figure— dispelled his doubts; he described the prose as so visual that an opera-house assassination scene played in his mind with image and sound, like a storyboard ready to be filmed.

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.

At the Kamen Rider 40th Anniversary Exhibition, Kojima photographed his son beside a modern Rider while Kojima posed next to Rider 1 and shouted the command to transform. Inside, parents and children divided by generation: Kojima became so absorbed by Ishinomori’s still-stained artist’s palette and an original manga page that he unintentionally let go of his son’s hand, and the boy went on with the younger families to the display of TV show costumes.

Kojima noted that in the manga Kamen Rider does not use the mask to hide a secret identity but to conceal the scars of his cyborg surgery, scars that reappear with rage or sorrow. He interpreted the hero as an artificial monster who faces total isolation and who draws from that solitude the purpose to fight when no one else can defend peace and nature.

Kojima interpreted the handover between Kamen Rider 1 and 2 as a linking of mind and soul that frees the hero from fighting alone, mirroring how readers and characters are connected from parent to child. He finished the exhibit by taking his son’s hand and stepping out toward the future with him as they compared the differently colored batons Kamen Rider had entrusted to their respective generations.

Kojima counted himself among the fanatic followers of the Kenzie & Gennaro series who waited ten years for the return of Patrick and Angela while continuing to read Lehane’s works outside the saga. When he read Moonlight Mile as the series’ conclusion he gave Patrick, Angela and Bubba a heartfelt “Thank you!” upon finishing the last page, but instead of putting the book away he retrieved the previous volumes and reread them in order—reversing time to deny the farewell—and he still hoped he might meet them once more.

Kojima saw the Kenzie & Gennaro novels as more than a detective series: in a setting of violence, poverty, pain, and an apparent lack of a future, he cared that the characters kept struggling to live, and he considered that combination an expression of storytelling at its core.

Kojima recommended Darkness, Take My Hand as his choice among the six Kenzie & Gennaro novels and regarded it as a work of exceptional caliber. He said that after reading it for the first time he investigated buying the rights to adapt it into a film himself, and that in his view none of the subsequent installments surpassed Darkness.

In a September 2011 essay, Kojima wrote that each time a new Metal Gear came out he declared to the press that it would be the last he would make. He explained that all stories and all creators have an end, and that he wanted to bring his own story to its conclusion before he reached his.

Kojima explained in 2011 that he kept continuing Metal Gear because, while fans fervently wanted more, he felt the story could not end and a creator could not turn his back on them. At the same time he recognized that neither creators nor their series are eternal, a contradiction he described as a spiral in which they became trapped.

As a child, inspired by Motojiro Kajii’s “The Lemon,” Kojima would sneak California lemons into places he did not like and leave them there. In his imagination they were perfect grenades: he could carry them anywhere, operate them alone, and use them to blow the world apart whenever he wanted.

In high school, a childhood friend named Tatsuo bookmarked a passage about DATURA in Ryu Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies, acted it out for Kojima, said it was “cool,” pressed the book against Kojima’s chest, and left. Kojima devoured the novel without stopping to eat or drink and described an extreme physical reaction—dizziness, pounding in his chest, nausea, and sexual arousal—caused by prose whose furious energy did not resemble images, sounds, or anything he had previously known.

Kojima channeled his youthful destructive impulse into his work and his children, believing the era of Rock had ended. Thirty years after his first reading of Coin Locker Babies he realized the DATURA he had sought was in his own hands: he interpreted the games he released into the world as bombs loaded with memes capable of giving birth to another world and another self, and concluded the era of Rock was still alive.

The day before Sakyo Komatsu’s death, Kojima saw Japan Sinks on a special display in a bookstore and bought it; he felt a sense of fate because an earthquake had forced the public to rediscover the author. Seeking to understand what Komatsu might have felt about Tohoku, Kojima reacquired several of Komatsu’s works, and an adult rereading of Virus superimposed a scene of skeletons in Tokyo Bay with 3/11 in his mind and moved him to tears.

When he read almost exclusively science fiction, Kojima held a grudge against the world, thought a society like that deserved to be destroyed, and preferred books about apocalypse. Upon confronting reality, he changed his reading: he concluded that SF was not a tool for escapism but a medium to send warnings across national and generational boundaries into the future.

In October 2011, Kojima interpreted the chain of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in Tohoku as more than a natural disaster: a human failure born of scorn for nature. He maintained that a true resurrection must not simply rebuild the previous world, but choose a new, untrodden course that does not reproduce the memes of envy, hatred, and vengeance.

At a USC talk in 2011, Kojima said he began writing as a young man and that one of his early pieces was a long story titled Survival Battle, set in a world where everyone fought when they turned fourteen and earned extra time in their lifespan for each victory.

“only oddball in my class that wanted to make movies or novels”

“to surprise my professor, and he was very surprised, but it didn't help my grade much”

“I felt great potential in the medium”

“true game design”

“First, come up with something you like, and then show it to as many people as you can. Tweak it, and get their opinions.”

In 2011 Kojima described his week as sleeping only four hours a night and spending the rest of each day working or in meetings; he said he himself regrets being away from his family so much, but tries to keep weekends free to spend with them.

“plays with Legos all day”

In 2011 Kojima described a difference between Eastern and Western design: in Japan players are placed in a room with one door that leads to a room with two doors, and so on, so the game opens up gradually; in the West players can be dropped into a jungle early on, where freedom and exploration are valued.

Kojima lived near the sea in Tsujido until he was three, and after returning to the nearby Tokyo area in 1996 he took his eldest son many times to the coastal towns of his memories. On one route in Enoshima they saw fish, ate rice with seafood and manju buns, rode the ESCAR toll escalator—which Kojima called a rip-off—returned by ferry and ended the day in a café: Kojima drank coffee, the boy had juice, and Southern All-Stars songs played in the background.

Three pages of Umimachi Diary made Kojima cry: a girl (Suzu) cries alone for her father while the page composition isolates her with no background and then opens the framing to bring the four sisters together. Seeing how a hand on Suzu’s back and a handkerchief visually transformed solitude into belonging, Kojima thought that panel layouts were invented for that.

As his eldest son grew, Kojima stopped visiting Kamakura and likewise became too lazy to go back to Kobe; Umimachi Diary reminded him of what he had lost and what he must not forget. At the end of that summer he went to Hayama with his younger son, and from the train saw the sea where he had played with his father and where he had gone with his first son, and he decided to resume that diary of outings when the younger son is old enough.

According to Konami’s 25th anniversary website, the project’s original objective was to make a war game, but the MSX2 could not display many enemy soldiers on a single screen nor more than four bullets at once, so Kojima proposed a game about fleeing the enemy in the style of the film The Great Escape: with the rule of escaping without fighting, the tension of war could be conveyed without many enemies on screen.

Kojima said he had a particular fondness for true escape and survival stories and recalled rewatching The Great Escape and Papillon in theaters, as well as seeing 127 Hours. He came to Hyoryu because novelist Naoki Hyakuta had read Kojima’s essay on Papillon and recommended Hyoryu and Hagoku (Prison Break).

From Hyoryu, Kojima concluded that the human body needs work and movement: the castaway who balances his diet, exposes himself to the sun, and keeps active survives where others fall ill after long periods of immobility. He thought this lesson also applied to modern urban life and that an idle, purposeless existence guided only by desire is not sustainable.

Kojima distinguished in Hyoryu between passive survival and regaining a human goal: returning home. He was struck that the shipwrecked men combined physical strength, artisan memory, and cooperation to make, from driftwood and remnants, things as basic as a reservoir and ultimately a ship, and that when they left they left tools and instructions for future castaways. He saw in that two meanings of survival—enduring adversity and making it back alive—and the passing on of something human beyond mere genes.

Kojima admitted he was not exactly a Stephen King fan and had read very few of King’s novels, yet he would buy without thinking any translated book whose obi said King praised it; he preferred Robert R. McCammon and was already a follower of Joe Hill. When a newly revised edition of ’Salem’s Lot appeared, simply seeing King’s name in large letters inside a quote on the obi made him reflexively purchase the book, even though the praise in the obi was not King’s.

Kojima explained the realism of ’Salem’s Lot as arising from an almost eccentric accumulation of details about the town, enough for the reader to accept vampires without any explanation. He also praised two montage devices: a whole day narrated by jumping between the town’s inhabitants, and a final confrontation structured as hours advancing toward sunset—a countdown that made him sweat, hold his breath, and keep turning the pages.

When he began receiving requests to write cover blurbs and obi, Kojima concluded that a recommendation capable of luring someone toward a book also transmits memes, even if it lacks the prestige of creating the work. He stated that his own series of recommendation essays in Da Vinci would not have been possible without his prior encounters with King’s name on those obi.

Kojima bought the Christmas installment of I Spy for his son without really knowing what it was because, when he opened it, the pictures transformed his surroundings into a world of silver. Father and son became hooked, solving the riddles together almost every night, and Kojima kept buying one volume after another until, by the beginning of the next year, they had collected the entire series; he jokingly warned against shameless copycat books.

What set I Spy apart for Kojima was that searches started from word clues rather than from a pictured model: the player had to abandon a preconceived notion of how, for example, a frog should look, accept shadows, reflections and objects that are cut off at the page edge, and mentally shift the scale within a toy-like world. The books did not include answers; instead they replaced that certainty with extra challenges and prompts to invent one’s own riddles, to be played alone or with a child.

Kojima joked that his aged eyes did not lessen the pleasure of I Spy because the battle is fought with the mind, not with visual acuity. Against search engines that hand you stores, movies, or books effortlessly, he defended the joy and catharsis of searching on your own and training the discernment needed to find something valuable.

Kojima said he owns every book in the I Spy series and specifically recommended I Spy 7: Treasure Hunt and Can You See What I See? Treasure Ship. He noted that the dioramas in Treasure Ship took nine months to stage and highlighted a sequence in which each image opens the shot relative to the previous one; that filmlike technique was one reason he considered it his favorite.

Kojima spent thirty-five years wondering what his father had been trying to tell him with his look before dying. Reading Hoshiyadori no Koe made him understand that he had not lost his father completely: he carried his father’s voice inside him and heard it as an instruction to look after others. He connected that revelation to a future moment when he himself would pass his memes to his children and they would understand his look.

Kojima continued to consult the annual guide Kono Mystery ga Sugoi not so much to find new books as to check whether the books he had chosen for himself appeared on the list. In 2012 he congratulated himself for recognizing the top entries until he came across Hiroko Minagawa, an author he had not read; this wounded his pride as a daily visitor to bookstores. After learning that Minagawa, now eighty-two, also walked inside a bookstore every day, he delightedly opened The Resurrection Fireplace and immediately proceeded to read two more of her works, Shi no Izumi (Fountain of Death) and Toritsu Suru To no Satsujin (Murder at the Upside-Down Tower).

After searching major bookstores for Minagawa’s older works, Kojima lamented that unconventional stories set in unfamiliar countries and eras are reprinted less and sell more poorly. He argued that understanding unknown cultures, customs, places, and beliefs requires effort and stamina, and that that intellectual exposure to new worlds is where the authentic pleasure of reading lies.

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.

“It was during that time that my parents introduced a family tradition: every night we would all watch a film together. I wasn't allowed to go to bed till the film had finished: the opposite of how it is for most children.”

In high school, using a friend’s 8 mm camera, Kojima convinced his classmates to shoot zombie shorts. For the school cultural festival he made a zombie film and sold tickets for about 50p with the idea of raising money to buy more films to watch, but he did not make enough to buy even one. On another occasion he attempted to shoot a Robinson Crusoe–style island survival story, but the group wasted the trip bathing and ultimately turned the project into another zombie movie.

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

“I walked in and the shopkeepers knew about me. I couldn't believe it. It was the most surprising moment in my life.”

“Shinkawa was born to be a video game artist.”

“So, after the second Metal Gear launched, I developed my own scripting engine and decided to work on adventure games so that I could have complete control over when the animation played or when the music triggered.”

“Lost World was the first project I was assigned to and the game was cancelled after six months.”

“Without that encounter I probably wouldn't have pursued a proper sequel, and there might never have been a Metal Gear Solid.”

“Every week they paid for us to visit a forest in the mountains nearby. We would dress up in military uniform and play games there. It was a good time.”

“We had so much more budget so we were able to go to Hollywood and hire a composer.”

One year after March 11, Kojima remained distressed by the earthquake and radioactive contamination: he feared that Japan could disappear as a nation and that he could lose his sense of belonging as a Japanese person. That anxiety led him back to Ágota Kristóf’s trilogy to ask what it means to lose one’s homeland.

Kojima read the shifting structure of The Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie as an expression of Ágota Kristóf’s tearing between identities, borders, and languages. Noting that she wrote in French, a language she often called “an enemy language,” he asked whether the Japanese could continue to live in someone else’s tongue if they lost Japanese, which he regarded as inseparable from their identity; while writing the essay he reread all of Kristóf’s novels straight through.

When Kojima reached a point in his life where he no longer trusted that he knew his own mountain or purpose, an editor at Da Vinci recommended The Summit of the Gods. The thousand pages of its two volumes made him feel cold, suffocated, and longing for the suffering to stop, but after climbing those two paper mountains alongside the characters he was able to once again face his own purpose.

Kojima began by identifying with the climber Joji Habu, who selects dangerous, untried routes and turns into reality what no one else has done. However, the cameraman Makoto Fukamachi’s monologue shook him: Kojima recognized that his older self was no longer the pioneering leader but the one who follows behind, returns alive, and goes back to the mountain again and again because it is all he can do.

Kojima said that making video games was his mountain: it pulled him away from his previous path and saved him. He noted that the medium was changing form, yet he resolved to keep climbing even if he had to abandon everything else—not because the mountain was already there, but precisely because it was not yet there.

Kojima admired that The City & The City did the opposite of the usual route: it began with an absurd idea—two superimposed cities whose inhabitants are trained not to see one another—and introduced enough everyday elements to make that idea feel like an ordinary fact. He first regarded it as a crime novel, then as urban fantasy, and finally as urban literature; that deliberate crossing of genres gave him chills.

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.

“Policenauts also had its own share of naming issues. The game was originally known as "Beyond," reflecting the theme of the story. Konami could not trademark this name, so they went with Policenauts instead.”

“He tried to explain the meaning over and over again via the phone, but was frustrated with his inability to get through.”

“"Silent Hill" is in closed room setting and doesn't require full action so that we can focus on the graphic quality. Enemy doesn't have to be a lot or move fast. It only requires scariness by graphics and presentation. As being a creator making action game in open world, such game is very enviously attractive. Wish someone could create this on FOX engine.”

“It would be a scary game if we make Silent Hill game on FOX engine.”

The scene in The Drifting Classroom where the protagonist has his appendix removed without anesthetic stayed so vividly with Kojima that every time he hears the word "appendix" he remembers the surgery and prays he never has to undergo it. He said that scene affected him more than the improvised femoral artery operation in Black Hawk Down.

As a child, Kojima liked being at school when it rained. The curtain of bad weather made the building feel isolated, but beneath the fluorescent lights and surrounded by teachers and friends he did not feel lonely; he imagined the school as a spaceship in the darkness. During typhoons he fantasized that only the children in his grade were drifting and could create their own world and rules, apart from the world the adults had prepared.

Kojima contrasted The Drifting Classroom with survival stories that end with a return home. His children begin wanting to go back, but accept that they cannot and see themselves as seeds scattered into the future; after Tohoku, Kojima viewed that drifting away from the previous era as a possible new way of living to preserve the future.

“In the past I've mentioned Silent Hill in interviews, and as a result of that the president of Konami rung me up and said he'd like me to make the next Silent Hill.”

“Honestly, I'm kind of a scaredy-cat when it comes to horror movies, so I'm not confident I can do it. At the same time, there's a certain type of horror that only people who are scared of can create, so maybe it's something I can do.”

“That said, I think Silent Hill has a certain atmosphere. I think it has to continue, and I'd love to help it continue, and if I can help by supervising or lending the technology of the Fox Engine, then I'd love to participate in that respect.”

“Personally I love adventure games, and I'd love to see other chapters in the Snatcher or Policenaut series. But from a business perspective it's pretty hard to make that work. I think it's my job to push forward, so I don't think I could make it.”

“I've done a lot of boss battles in a lot of games, and one thing I try to accomplish is make something no one has ever seen before. From that perspective, two bosses I'm a fan of are Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid and The Sorrow from Metal Gear Solid 3.”

“What I can say is that I've aged alongside Snake, and I've matured along with him. As long as there's a Snake in Metal Gear Solid, that Snake will always be a part of me, so I don't think I could ever do a Snake that's much younger than myself.”

“For example, if at some point if we decided to bring out a JRPG with Snake in his teens, I don't think that's something I could do. I'd have to leave that with the younger staff.”

Kojima placed All She Was Worth among his fifty all-time favorite books and called it his favorite work by Miyuki Miyabe. Twenty years after its publication, he linked its depiction of a daily hell of credit and debt to new forms of economic dematerialization; in 2012 he pointed to the complete gacha controversy in social games as a possible warning sign of another predatory machinery.

What moved Kojima most about All She Was Worth was that the suspect hardly appears directly: only traces, photos and rumors remain of a woman who erased her past to keep on living. In the final confrontation he shared the detective’s absence of anger and even found himself wishing the culprit might get away; when he closed the book he felt she was still waiting and that his own hand rested on her shoulder.

Kojima discovered Shadow 81 while in his second year of junior high when a faceup stack of the foreign genre novel stood out in Shinchosha’s new-release section; he associated Shinchosha with serious classics and the publisher’s tactfully elegant cover completed the attraction. Thirty-five years later he reread the book and, on a Hayakawa reprint, found his own obi endorsement: he described the novel as his absolute favorite and said he had never seen a plot that surpassed it.

Shadow 81 changed the distance Kojima kept from stories in which the criminal occupies the noble side. He found it refreshing that the kidnapping did not spill blood and operated like an intellectual, mathematical con; the ending gave him satisfaction and engendered sympathy for the culprits that was detached from any grand ideological cause.

While writing the essay, Kojima placed side by side the fourth printing of the second edition of Shadow 81 and a finger-marked Shinchosha first edition, reobtained used. He even compared the altitude and angle of the silhouetted aircraft on both covers, imagining the plane still flew above his head.

Kojima said he entered high school unable to tell dogs from cats because he had never had either as a pet; not for lack of wanting one, but because his mother suffered from asthma. In his first summer of high school he picked Jennie by Paul Gallico despite not being a cat lover, and he suspected the title might have reminded him of Jaime Sommers from The Bionic Woman.

Thirty-three years after his youthful reading, Kojima took Jennie from his bookshelf again. Upon rereading it he discovered that the cat had influenced not only his view of women but also his creative work.

Kojima attributed Jennie as a subconscious inspiration for The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3. He framed the opposition of Snake as a stray dog and The Boss as a mother cat in terms of his intention to introduce motherhood and the point of view of stray cats into a saga he had until then regarded as a story of parricide led by war dogs.

For Kojima, Jennie simultaneously occupies the roles of lover, teacher, rival, partner, and confidante. He read the novel as more than a moral tale about a bittersweet first love and loss: a story about living, told from a feminine point of view, and about how to pass the baton (his "memes") to the next generation.

Kojima closed his essay by imagining his adolescent reading of Jennie as a dream in which he met a cat. An adult rereading made him realize he had never forgotten that experience and led him to correct his initial claim that he had never had a cat: in an intimate sense he had had Jennie and continued to carry her meme inside him.

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.

One and a half years before Project Itoh’s death, Kojima commissioned Itoh to write the novelization of Metal Gear Solid 4—not to make use of an up-and-coming author, but so that another bearer of his memes would connect the video game’s story to a different medium. Kojima considered that Itoh did not merely trace the game’s plot and scenes: he transformed the material into a work of his own that could convey Kojima’s ideas even to readers unfamiliar with the game; Kojima described it as not novelized but Itoh-ized.

According to the book’s capsule, Project Itoh was hospitalized immediately after the meeting to plan the Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots novelization and wrote the entire manuscript from his hospital bed. He identified with Otacon and Raiden, chose Otacon as the narrator to project himself into the novel, and built the rest of the work from that decision.

As he approached fifty, Kojima acknowledged that studio work was already physically fatiguing and that he should be preparing a successor and retirement, but the person to whom he had handed the baton had died before him. He said he could only pick up Itoh’s last wishes and continue telling stories; he also began the series My Lovable Memes after Itoh’s death to search for new receivers.

“Pacific Rim is the ultimate otaku film that all of us had always been waiting for. Who are you, if you are Japanese and won't watch this?”

“It's not only about my political views, but I really like movies. I try to watch a movie a day, if not more, and through movies I learned about so many different political themes I hadn't been interested in and cultural things I hadn't been aware of and economic factors I hadn't thought about.”

“I think that's part of my role, part of my duty, to put in my games what I experience through movies, to explore this philosophy that movies gave me. I want to provide something similar to people through the games I create.”

“it's not about the engine, it's not about the graphical fidelity, because I'm not trying to portray violence. I'm trying to portray what is violence itself.”

“There are so many games where you fight aliens or zombies, and they have very high-fidelity graphics, but they don't ask the question of why the events are happening. In Metal Gear, I'm trying to get at why all these violent things happened in the first place.”

“In the case of a movie, in the end it's a different character separate from you executing all these actions. But in the game, it depends on you. It depends on your will to execute, to do something, to be violent or not.”

“I know that no one would ever wear a box in war, but I want to change the mood, relieve the stress and tension and control a little bit the feelings of the player by letting them calm down and relax for a second and then continue through the mission.”

“Originally I wanted to hand the series off to younger staff and let them carry on with it. And so we did, and that resulted in the game Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. But after Rising, we found that for my younger staff, the numbered games were just too heavy for them. So that's why I decided to come back and work on them myself.”

“Every game I make, I create thinking it's really, really going to be the last game I create. So I put as much as I can in and make sure I have no regrets.”

“And the content of the game, what is really the essence of the game, hasn't moved much beyond Space Invaders. It's the same old thing, that the bad guy comes and without further ado the player has to defeat him. The content hasn't changed — it's kind of a void.”

In August 2014 Kojima released P.T. under a fictitious studio name, 7780s Studio, to conceal that it was from Kojima Productions; the project was actually a playable teaser for Silent Hills, the game he was preparing with Guillermo del Toro, a connection that was revealed only upon completing the demo. Silent Hills was later cancelled.

“Human fear ultimately stems from the unknown. P.T. was an experiment in producing an effect in response to that nature.”

While meeting George Miller in Japan during the promotion of Mad Max: Fury Road, Kojima told him that his games are made inheriting various genes from the director, and that if he exists it is because Miller existed.

“I've been stuck with something of a father complex ever since. All the Metal Gear games so far have been paternal stories. They're all about killing your father (laughs).”

“He'd say, 'Watch me carefully, Hideo,' and take a magic marker and paint the connecting pieces in the stone walls around the castle, then wipe them with paint thinner from the top. 'You should always make these fine lines black like this,' he'd say.”

“This isn't the kind of movie a child can understand though”

“As a child I couldn't understand this. If they can sit down and talk like that, why do they even need to fight in the first place? I thought.”

“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.”

Kojima spent almost three decades at Konami, beginning in 1986. In 2015, amid a bitter split, Konami removed Kojima's name from Metal Gear Solid V marketing; at The Game Awards in December 2015 the game won awards but Kojima did not attend, reportedly barred from attending by Konami. That same month Kojima re-established Kojima Productions as an independent studio partnered with Sony. Silent Hills had been cancelled in April 2015.

Since Kojima Productions was founded in 2015, its motto has been "From Sapiens to Ludens": the idea of humanity evolving from Homo Sapiens (the one who thinks) to Homo Ludens (the one who plays and creates). Its mascot, Ludens — designed with Yoji Shinkawa — is a spacesuit-clad figure carrying a flag, a symbol of arrival and exploration rather than conquest.

“I'll do whatever the (expletive) he wants”

“If I'm going through a difficult patch, and I watch a great movie, it reminds me that there are so many creative people out there all over the world pushing hard to accomplish great things. That really motivates me to keep going. So I guess these are the two reasons why I make sure I watch movies every day.”

“Last year, I thought I lost everything. But I didn't.”

“I think what happened to Hideo Kojima last year was a tragedy, but he never complained. He just sat in an isolated room for months, looked inside himself and focused on his art.”

At The Game Awards in December 2016, Kojima presented the second Death Stranding trailer, revealing Mads Mikkelsen and Guillermo del Toro as appearing in the game.

“couldn't even talk to them – he had to talk through someone else. That's how that game was finished.”

“It's very intricate. I mean, you know (Kojima). He's a very brilliant man. I mean… the stuff he told me? I only understood some of it.”

“In Death Stranding, 'strand' stands for strings and connections, and I felt a mysterious connection to that song that I found in that CD shop in Reykjavík two years ago.”

“Ryan's songs are sensual and the sounds he creates are unique.”

“I've been away from Twitter as my mother passed away recently but I feel like start tweeting again.”

“I’m back”

“Hideo Kojima's lifetime achievement award from @BrasilGameShow just arrived. Obrigado Brasil, it's already in display in our entrance!”

“Thank you, Lynch-sensei. You gave me courage.”

“It is not directly related to DEATH STRANDING but I wanted to let them know the direction and the world of Lynch.”

“You just can't see them, but you're connected.”

“I feel always lonely in society”

Kojima linked the speed and quality of his work to teams small enough to let him walk through the studio, spot problems where they arise, and give directions directly. He compared that method to visiting bookstores: solutions do not come from an automatic search, but from his own judgment, which he must keep refining with his eyes, head, and body.

Kojima admitted that analyzing past successes can produce a sellable, low-risk product, but he rejected that method because tomorrow always arrives and what was accepted yesterday does not remain the same. He held that past experiences are necessary not to imitate but to connect differently; therefore he reads, watches movies, listens to music, visits museums, and meets people as a practice to learn from history and create the future.

Before becoming a designer, Kojima turned to stories as a compass when he doubted his future: experiencing unfamiliar times and places expanded his world and refined his outlook. When he was able to make a living from creating, he changed his relationship with stories and began thinking about how to connect his works with players and the world; he said he wanted to push those who were standing still, help them move forward, and make the world better.

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 argued that stories about impossible journeys can circulate through culture and help turn them into reality. In response to accusations of escapism, he maintained that fiction contains truth and can serve as a frontline tool to correct real-world problems; for that reason he wants to continue telling stories and creating connections between people, worlds, and times.

Gen Hoshino said he admires that Kojima takes a very specific humorous detail—one that might otherwise end as a laugh during a meeting—and has the conviction to make it part of the game and share the joke with the player. Encountering that humor in Kojima’s work reminds Hoshino that if he wants to make an interesting idea real, he must not give up on it.

Kojima says one must live with one’s receptive antennae out and scanning in all directions, an exhausting attention to diverse stimuli. His process is to hold onto what sparks interest, turn it over in the mind, shape it, and bring it out into the world; the same material absorbed can reappear as an essay, lyrics, sound, performance, or a video game depending on the medium and the creator’s technique.

Kojima stated that creating the new company was more difficult than developing Death Stranding: upon becoming independent he had to recover credibility, financing, people and a place to work. Fans of his earlier games helped him in unforeseen ways, and he was able to deal directly with Hollywood actors who appreciated Metal Gear and wanted to participate out of mutual affinity.

Kojima said he never runs out of things he wants to do because technology keeps advancing and ideas come to him effortlessly. Although his team sometimes puts the brakes on proposals for having no precedent, he maintained that almost nothing is impossible; he added the inverse limit that if he himself perceives an idea will not be interesting, he must stop it even when it is already highly developed.

When testing Metal Gear’s initial concept—hiding and escaping from enemies—Kojima considered it essential to distinguish two failures: that the idea wasn’t properly realized in the game, or that the idea itself wasn’t fun. In the second case he would have canceled the game; handing that decision over to marketing would have removed his ability to turn back and resulted in a typical video game.

Kojima said he wants to make music because, deep down, he wants to do everything himself, but he cannot get anything to come out. He sometimes thinks he has composed a melody when singing to himself and later discovers, to his disappointment, that it was a song he had already heard.

Before the release, Kojima compared playing Death Stranding to climbing Mt. Fuji alone: the effort can lead someone to question why they continue and to give up, but reaching the summit and seeing the sunrise validates the difficulty and can make them cry. He noted that someone who turns back before the summit does not reach that emotion.

Kojima explained an optional encounter in Death Stranding in which Sam periodically delivers medicine to a man who has no direct importance to the main plot. If the player forgets to continue bringing the medicine, the man will die. With that mechanic Kojima wanted players to experience that forming a connection also means taking on responsibility, and that their actions can both build and break that connection.

Kojima designed the online relationships in Death Stranding so players do not meet directly but leave objects and “likes.” He gave the example of finding on a path a musical device abandoned by someone else: it only lets you infer that they liked that song, yet it turns a solitary walk into one that reveals another presence. In contrast to the frontal dialogue of social media, he wanted a cushioned connection that forces the player to imagine who was there and what they were thinking.

“I allowed myself to create this temporary genre by the name 'social strand', because it's more fair to the game”

“Even when I went to the bank, I couldn't borrow money. They said, 'We know you're renowned, but you don't have any actual results.'”

“So Conan, do you want to be in the game? [...] We have a 3D scanner right there.”

“I first met Hideo when Guillermo del Toro called me and said, 'Hey, there's a guy who's going to call you and wants to do a video game with you. Just say yes.' I said, 'Who is he?' And he said, 'Trust me, just say yes.'”

“I first met Hideo when Guillermo del Toro called me and said, 'Hey, there's a guy who's going to call you and wants to do a video game with you. Just say yes.'”

In November 2019, during the promotion of Death Stranding, Kojima received two Guinness World Records for being the game director with the most followers on both Twitter and Instagram.

“In the future, Kojima Productions will start making films. If you can do one thing well, then you can do everything well.”

“I'm very interested in the new format of game that will appear on there and that's what I want to take on.”

“But this game is, to start with, like Guillermo del Toro told me, not a way to break out, but to make something that the fans expect. There are new elements to the game but the basis is something people are used to playing.”

“Of course I have my sons, to whom I'm connected, but I can't really rely on anyone, actually. That's why I'm creating things, because I can't rely on people, in a way.”

“Everyone thinks I do crazy stuff, but I'm sensitive. I lost my father when I was really young. I couldn't really speak to my dad. I had to say: believe in yourself, and do what you believe. That's how I lived and who I am today.”

“Everyone has [trauma], whether they say it or not. I'm not saying: go over your trauma, but I think people should look at it as their individualism as well. You don't need to be embarrassed. I hope I can encourage people with trauma to be brave and just go on”

“This is about an era of individualism. Everyone is fragmented, in America or Europe, but at the same time we're connected by the internet. This magical technology should have made people happy, but we're battling each other.”

“On the internet, like in games, we're all competing for a headshot. Of course it's fun, but we're animals and can't live alone. I want people to experience the meaning of connection through Death Stranding's world and its systems.”

“I can't say right now, but it's something you've never seen. It's a game, but also a movie … no, I'm starting to say it!”

“my father pushing me out on the ocean on a boat. It was so frightening. I still go into the ocean, and I dive from time to time, but I get really frightened about these big waves and big ocean animals.”

“I thought, I'll tell her once I've become a little successful. I didn't want her to worry.”

“The ghosts in the game — maybe my parents are one of them, seeing me in this world. I wanted to have that kind of metaphor, that within you, you're connected to the people that passed away.”

“That's why I added this indirect online connection in the game — so that people will feel it's alright, it's okay. You're relieved that you're not alone. You see other people's footprints and think it's not just me here.”

“Travis [Bickle] was the same as me in a way. I'm Japanese; I thought every American guy never even felt solitude. So this was new to me. When I saw Taxi Driver, I was surprised but I empathized. I felt relieved.”

“I felt lonely when I was talking to my friends because they couldn't understand. I wanted to go home … and turn on the lights because I was frightened. I had so many friends at school, but was lonely. I didn't tell anyone. I thought I was sick.”

“I knew what the fans wanted. A big game, up-to-date visuals, something that would surprise even the movie people”

“I wanted to start very slowly, so that the world looks beautiful, but you kind of feel odd. There's something broken here.”

“would start from zero”

At the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, Kojima suggested that prospective game developers watch two films a day.

According to Vulture, Kojima edits his own trailers for his games, a task typically handled by ad agencies.

“Me as an old man going to the theater by myself on this day? I changed my plan to stay in my office working on my next concept.”

“It's OK; everyone can evaluate what they want. In three to five years, we will see what people will say.”

“technical limitations of the MSX hardware made it impossible to produce a simultaneous display of the player with multiple enemies”

“Shocked to know Ennio Morricone has passed away.. RIP. I just bought the OST of "The Legend of 1900". I used his music "Here's To You" sing by Joan Baez for MGS V: Ground Zeroes, the song used in the film "Sacco e Vanzetti".”

“I'd like to say that am not a prophet, because if I was I probably would have created a game that would sell more.”

To launch Kojima Productions after going independent in December 2015, Kojima rented an office of under nine square meters and conducted an international search for staff, software tools, and engines while the studio began production on a new game.

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.

Kojima recalls that, as a child, he was the first to come home alone: turning on the lights was his duty and opening a book in solitude became his routine. He says books kept the feelings of isolation and loneliness from crushing him, and that after his father’s early death he found within books adults and teachers who served as guides and role models.

Kojima keeps the purchase receipt inside nearly every book on his shelves. The receipt, printed with the store’s name and the date and time, brings back not only the book’s content but also what he experienced before going to the bookstore, where he read it, and the imprint the story left; even a boring book becomes associated with a memory he considers uniquely his.

Kojima explains that always following the same fixed route through a bookstore is efficient but causes him to stop seeing what lies outside it. Visiting a new or less familiar bookstore disorients him and disrupts his ossified patterns of thought; even the same books can show a different side depending on the store’s size, environment, and arrangement.

VIZ's biographical note places Kojima's birth in Tokyo in 1963, his directorial debut with Metal Gear in 1987, the establishment of his independent studio Kojima Productions at the end of 2015, and the release of Death Stranding in 2019.

“I received the 72nd Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts from the Agency of Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan. Thank you very much. I have been creating games for 36 years.”

“I am very happy that the immature medium of games has been highly evaluated as a cultural art form of "expression". I will continue to devote myself to the creation of digital entertainment.”

Kojima said he tries to watch one film a day and devotes all his non-working time to that; he gets through meals as quickly as possible and spends the rest of his time on film watching and reading, except on weekends when he plays with his children.

“As soon as I got home, I turned on every light in every room and switched on the TV at high volume—not to watch anything, but to distract from the loneliness.”

“...my dad couldn't answer. He just kept looking at me through convulsions. His eyes looked like they were trying to tell me something...”

“I have been knowing Mr. Oshii for 26 years now. It’s been a really long time since I’ve seen him, partly because of the pandemic, so I really enjoyed today’s recording. This will be broadcasted on the Spotify program “Hideo Kojima presents Brain Structure”. Please look forward to it. So tonight, I re-watch “PATLABOR THE MOVIE” for the first time in 33 years.”

“I really respect Mr. Oshii as a creator, but as a person too. I've known him for 26 years and owe him for a number of things. Thanks to this show, I was able to meet with him again.”

“I came to Tokyo in 1996, not too long after going through the Kobe earthquake. At that time, I was making a game called Policenauts, and when we were working on the Sega Saturn version, Mr. Mamoru Oshii and I met and had our first conversation.”

“At one point, Mr. Oshii called me up and said, "I'm with Cameron in America, and we're going to go shoot some guns. Do you want to come with us?" At that time, I couldn't go though, but that's what our relationship has been like for 26 years.”

“At that time, actually, we had a plan for Mr. Oshii to come to my studio and get a 3D scan done of him so he could appear in Death Stranding. But he had a broken bone at that time, so I didn't get to see him.”

“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.”

“That first scene with Motoko and Ghost in the Shell is like one of my favourite movies, Melville Samurai.”

“It's a little presumption of me to make a commentary on it, but things really changed before and after Mr. Oshii's animation style.”

“I like films, but decided to make games, and that's why I think my work is a bit unique.”

“Mr. Oshii remixed it very precisely and I do that with my games too. It's that sort of thing that makes Mr. Oshii really special. He just builds up all the tiny details.”

“The whole place was crazy. I saw it and thought, great things can be made here. The lunches and everything were crazy too.”

“It's a difficult line to toe. You can't end up in the red, but don't want to be too far in the black and lose your freedom.”

“And then I made Metal Gear, and I really didn't think it was going to do that well. And it flew off the shelves, and Mr. Oshii was like, "Hideo, you can't make something like that."”

“They can't break free, they can't quit, they can't lose. It felt like that when Metal Gear started gaining fans and I started getting fan letters.”

“I can't just be like, whoops, sorry about last year. That's the scariest part of it all.”

“They won't tell me the budget and release dates get announced out of the blue. Or they would suddenly spill the contents of a project during promos. Once they totally gave away spoilers in a magazine interview.”

“Usually games are different from real life. You can fly, run at high speeds, get really powerful. A lot of people grew up on those kind of games, but this game is the opposite.”

“I can't really recommend it either. Mr. Oshii says that you should play offline and just watch the story on YouTube.”

“She's not motivated by money. She doesn't do anything that she doesn't want to do. If that wasn't the case, she wouldn't have worked on my project.”

“Then for episode 1, I'll direct the opening and you'll direct the rest of the story. For episode 2, you'll direct the opening. And I was like, what kind of nonsense is this?”

“I've been wanting to make one, but I don't have any time. I might be able to do just a screenplay.”

“I really wanted to do it all myself, seriously. If I could just make clones of myself, I would.”

“Movies are just one example, but you won't grow with just movies. Please eat food and drink water and also study.”

“But humans are imaginative, and since I'm also a creator, I don't want to hurt other creators' feelings, even if their work isn't entirely good.”

“It's called NOPE, but for me, it was a resounding yes.”

“There also aren't many people who can understand the creator, especially with something like this. Something that they've never seen before.”

“When we were younger, good camera technology didn't exist, so we assumed that strange things existed but just weren't caught on camera. So for us, UFOs were real.”

“I heard stories that the military was hiding information and the FBI had captured aliens. I made an homage to that in the Metal Gear series.”

“In this day and age, people don't believe in UFOs because if they existed, we should have good photos of them.”

“There was a period of time when that was popular too, aliens as the good guys.”

“In NOPE, and also in Death Stranding, when the UFOs get close, electricity goes out.”

“If aliens exist, everyone would be like, we don't need Death Stranding anymore. And I was really scared.”

“I think many people react in disbelief when asked if aliens exist, but I want them to exist.”

“We follow each other on Twitter, and he seemed to have played my game too. He said, hope you enjoy my movie. So, if you can come on the show as a guest, that would be great.”

“You can't show them the inside of your brain. You draw pictures and try to put it into words. But you can't show them in moving pictures.”

“We've been calling them UFOs this entire time, but they aren't called UFOs anymore. What are they called again? It starts with a U, but it's different after that. That makes me a little sad.”

“Way back in 2005, I did my own podcast, Hidechan! Radio, for a long time. I grew up in the generation of radio and after I became a creator, I wanted to give something back to the medium that was there for me when I was a lonely kid.”

“It was my first time meeting him, but I feel like we've known each other since childhood. I think we are going to be good friends.”

“Making games can be hard, and there's a lot that leaves me scratching my head, but your movie gave me energy. It motivated me to work a little harder.”

“Those kind of movies, even after 10 or 20 years, continue to be loved and even when technology changes, it remains inside of you like DNA.”

“No matter what country you were born in, what ethnicity, what household, everyone is different but everyone's total sum of fortune is the same. So don't give up. That's the message I wanted to convey through this character.”

“So the incredible thing about NOPE is that it's not just a horror movie, but it's made all the people looking down look up. It's epic.”

“But I think that actually going out, looking up at the sky and discovering your own shapes is the first step in creating lifelong impact.”

“I try not to feel the pressure too much when I'm creating, but I use that pressure and the hurdles to my advantage in order to aim higher. Thanks to that pressure, I can get better. It's really a blessing as a creator.”

“When I'm creating something, I kind of have two personalities, like a left-brain person and a right-brain person.”

“But no matter how much I think through all the possibilities, people find a way to do something I never expected. And that discovery is so fun, and well, maybe a coincidence, but I think it's magical.”

“They can see themselves from a bird's eye view or from a micro or macro perspective. I think those kind of talented people are meant to be creators.”

“But characters don't just move on their own. You have to find a part of yourself within them. Otherwise, you can't visualize them vividly.”

“So the difference lies in the work that you put in to make the impossible. And when you successfully create something, followers appear, and the realm of Possibility expands. This cycle is really wonderful, I think.”

“Well, in Japan, they sell movie pamphlets at the theatre, and I saw that they had shot it in the daytime. They didn't have the technology to film at night back then.”

“The amazing thing about Spielberg is that in Jaws, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Jurassic Park, his technique is to show the surprised expressions of the people. He won't show you what they're looking at.”

“Death Stranding was very slow-paced like NOPE, and the people who were able to play past that point really enjoyed the game. There were a lot of challenges though.”

“Just like Tom Cruise said in Maverick, I could never work this hard if it was a job. It's more like a mission. I'm dedicating my life not to myself but to someone else. I'm creating for those who are waiting for me.”

“I'll be in the middle of doing an air check, and my mom would turn on a light switch in the other room, and the tape would pick up that buzzing sound.”

“It was like your fingerprint. The pattern of the little crackling noises could help you identify whose record it was.”

“And whenever you visit a record shop or rental store, you knew that the staff there were all music lovers. […] Everyone was like Tarantino.”

“Subscribe? But I like buying CDs.”

“If I didn't do that, I would end up buying music from the artists I already know and like.”

“It was my dream to work on a project with him one day. I tried buying the synthesizers that he used to make some music, but the sound is different.”

“By the way, I first learned the word albedo from his album, Albedo 0.39. It's a term often used in the CG industry actually.”

“I went to see Blade Runner because I had already read and was a fan of Philip K. Dick's original work, and I was a fan of Ridley Scott from Alien, and then I found out that Vangelis was doing the music.”

“The music has a delicate, sparkly tone like glass breaking, and when you add John Anderson's clear, bright vocals to it, his angelic voice, it's such an incredible match.”

“At that time, if you did electronic music, people assumed you were a weirdo.”

“What I really wanted to do is something like what they did with Tom and Jerry, with the orchestra watching the performances and timing their music to the actions with symbols and stuff. I want to do that with games so that the music changes in time with what the player is doing.”

“I understand that I'm known as being made up of 70% movies, but in all honesty, I think I'm 70% books.”

“Every time I went, there were less and less books available. And then I realized it was because I was buying all the books.”

“I get sent tons of books from publishers a week before they're released to the public. I'm able to read books that nobody has read before.”

“I say meet because books have faces. The cover, the title, the design, the bindings. There are moments when you feel a spark.”

“When I became independent, I got rid of over 20,000 books.”

“So, it's all about just how many I can come across in my short life. That's why I go to the bookstore.”

“The first person is Stephen King. King has never let me down.”

“I don't read the ones that end up at the bottom of the stack, so every week I turn them over and change the order.”

“It goes on the back, behind the author, and for example, if it's for a series, and I have to write a review for the fourth book, I re-read from the first one.”

“These book fairs and awards create an opportunity for the bookstore to re-display some featured books.”

“That's why I choose my words carefully and make sure I don't use difficult words, so people who don't often read books can understand too.”

“Astute individuals may catch on if they see the cover, so you can't look at it. When you finish the book, you can take a look. […] The cover itself is a spoiler.”

“They're going to make it into a movie starring Ryan Gosling, but I don't think it's possible.”

“There are a lot of authors overseas who are like former Special Forces members, which you don't really see in Japan. Or doctors who write medical dramas. Lawyers who write courtroom dramas and whatnot.”

“Without Ryan, without you and your music, Death Stranding would not have been born. Your music will live forever in this world and in me.”

“And in these dark times, this film gave me courage and laughter and tears from how moved I was. […] I really felt the power of entertainment.”

“In this world that has become so digital, you shine a light on the beauty and instincts of human beings as living creatures.”

“You can convey emotions and tell a story through movement, and that's the power of movies. I think there are people who have forgotten all that.”

“And players can go left or right but I can't control the timeline unlike with movies. That's the hard part. But with that in mind, I would like to try something new.”

“Yes, I do get offers, and I would like to, but I just don't have the time. Say I spend one year doing a movie. What would my staff do for a year? But I am seeking ways to try to make it work.”

“So you have to cover up that ordinary parts and lead people in a certain direction where they'll think, maybe I can become a hero.”

“It'll be like RRR and H for Hideo, so RRR HHH or RH RH RH, we should call it RH Games.”

“I'm very much interested in films and novels from all over the world, but I am, after all, Japanese, so I try to make the most out of that in my creativity.”

“And in Mr. Rajamouli's films, the main characters always take their clothes off. Same with my games.”

“The scariest part is, even if I tell people it's a lie, I can't erase it because it's digital. It's still there. What was originally a joke became worldwide news so basically anyone can create fake news.”

“Once it is published on there, the lies become the truth. You can't stop it now. You can't delete it because it's digital. It will remain for centuries.”

“Nowadays, I tweet something, then the media will take that tweet and paste it somewhere and call it news. That's not how it should work. It's just a tweet. It's not meant to be news.”

“I've never once said anything to Phil about wanting to create a Death Stranding sequel. I don't know who pulled this kind of information from where.”

“Regardless, it should be up to the individual to decide whether something is good news or bad news. The internet can control that though.”

“But people should know that I wouldn't do the same thing twice. I've never spoken with Hassan.”

“It was 100% out of my pocket. No funding from anyone whatsoever. So we're independent.”

“Some of those offers are ridiculously high prices, but it's not that I want money. I want to make what I want to make. That's why I created this studio. So as long as I'm alive, I don't think I will ever accept those offers.”

“Well, this isn't fake news, but every single day from all over the world, I get messages saying, hey, make a new Metal Gear, or PT, or Boktai, or Zone of the Enders. I take this as a positive thing, but also, as adults, everyone should know that this isn't going to happen, right?”

“At this stage, nothing costs any money and since it can be done mentally, it's the most fun part for me.”

“People think that its purpose is to present the game to everyone around the world, but actually, it's not. It's to show the staff.”

“The hard parts are kind of like drugs. You begin to feel like you can't live without them.”

“But I can also do things I dislike so that I can continue doing the things I love. If you only do the things you love, you won't grow.”

“So when I drive, I get into accidents. Because I'm too distracted by my thoughts. […] I try to avoid driving whenever possible.”

“Yes, the process of going to the restroom. I don't really need to use the bathroom.”

“It's the making of Death Stranding, but it's also a bit like a documentary about me. I'll announce it when we're ready to announce it, so yeah.”

“I gave him a nickname. I call him Refn-chan. I have the best relationship with Refn-chan.”

“Then, I'll play a soundtrack that matches that, and the writing just happens naturally. It's like I'm not myself almost.”

“AI is going to keep biting at our heels, and I think our way of life is going to change into how long we can stay ahead of them.”

“I think there will come a time when I develop a game with just myself and AI, not the staff. It can be cumbersome to work with staff.”

“But when wars evolve to become not people versus people, nor nation versus nation, but AI versus AI, I wouldn't like a world like that.”

“People saying things like, I think Kojima has about three more games left in him. And I'm like, no, don't say that.”

“In Death Stranding, there is a beach where the time axis runs differently from the rest of the world. I feel like I'm living there.”

“I usually have 20 or 30 world stories and game systems running around in my head. They go through a selection process and eventually the one that's left is the best one.”

“Being an inexperienced youth is a strength. […] If you fail, you fail. You're still young, it's going to be okay.”

“Since the pandemic has gotten somewhat better, I was planning to ask him to do some more music for us. And then this news came in.”

“But screens at the movie theatre make you feel like you're walking two or three steps into the screen, giving you a realistic simulation experience.”

“Yet one movie over a span of 36 years has been reborn and has succeeded in reconnecting families, generations and family values. I think that's incredible.”

“I think movies and Games are totally different, like 180 degrees different. But I believe that the gap between the two will shrink over time.”

“But what I want to say is, it's not a matter of digital or analog. It's about sensibility.”

“The actress Lindsay Wagner from The Bionic Woman was my favourite actress growing up. So I wanted her in the game. And when I saw Jeff Bridges I thought about doing the same thing with Lindsay. And that's exactly what I did in Death Stranding.”

“You end up constantly doing this, so it becomes difficult to draw the line and say, stop.”

“I think that creating things is a means to say goodbye to your past self, so I think what you're saying is exactly right.”

“Should We Have Connected?”

Kojima Productions’ Tokyo headquarters has a pure white lobby where a life‑size statue of Ludens, the studio’s mascot, greets visitors; inside the studio there is a movie theatre and a gallery space where Kojima’s body of work is presented like a museum exhibit.

“Originally, I was writing Hideo's Mysteries as a joke on Twitter.”

“I started panicking and read a bunch right before the deadline. You definitely shouldn't do that. It's like I'm reading them just so I can make my selection.”

“I don't want to rank them, so I'm going to be announcing them in the order that I read them or the order that they went on sale.”

“This is seriously number one. I knew it from the moment I read it that it was going to be number one.”

“I actually know Don Winslow, but apparently this is his last book.”

“If anybody who is writing a novel reads this, they will probably give up writing. They'll be like, there's no way I can compete with this.”

“It's a mystery so I don't want to give too much away but when I read this I treated it as a work of literature.”

“With Horowitz and Hawthorne, nothing happens until halfway through the book. Usually, you have a dead body in the mix, but instead, you're made to read the development and relationship of these two characters for the longest time. That's the strength of a series.”

“Well-established literary authors will need to step it up. Let's stop there. I'm going to offend some of the people I know.”

“I actually received a message from him on Twitter. […] I can't believe he wrote something this good his first time around.”

“Molly is just a little bit clumsy at life.”

“And here I was, thinking it would be like Sailor suit and machine gun. The beginning was crazy. So gory. They don't hold back at all.”

“But make sure you choose it yourself. Don't just borrow one from somebody. I give people recommendations, but you have to be the one to decide which one to read from there. Take responsibility. When you hit the jackpot, you'll be hooked.”

“I wrote those comments because I want people to read the books. But also, after you read the books, you can look back at those comments and understand the meaning behind them. They serve a double purpose.”

“Of course, the reading part is fun too, but picking out the books, therein lies the fun.”

“It almost seemed like a waste to add my voice over it, but since he created it with this purpose in mind, I'll take advantage of it.”

“So I can't read it, but I'm happy just to own it.”

“It's a song that has been used in movies and I actually thought about using it for the ending of Death Stranding. The lyrics and the vibe would have fit really well, so I had that song in mind when I made the ending.”

“But then, the distribution company contacted me saying that the movie was going to be released in Japan, and sent me a CD. Even though I already owned the CD.”

“Death Stranding is also based on the idea that we are not alone. Even if you think you're alone, you find other people out there, and from there you have a connection.”

“I mean, they're traveling to get footage of animals, but ultimately their goal is the same as mine. They want to give it all they've got, and there is a return for the effort they put in, and that is amazement.”

“And really, the guys from the big cities are the ones that look really unusual and out of place there.”

“The only things I had were four staff members, my computer, and my iPhone.”

“I wanted to provide a different look to it and so I used Iceland as one of the concepts in order to incorporate a bit of surrealism to the world.”

“As far as digital contents go, we basically only had a naked Norman, a naked Lou, a beach and a whale. And well, that reflected the state that Kojima Productions was in. We were naked.”

“I built up the world of Death Stranding in parallel with Ryan's music, and I talked to him about how I wanted to use his music in the game too, not just the teaser.”

“So yeah, after going independent, I had nothing. All I had were connections with people, so I followed those connections to make the game.”

“So people told me to go with Keanu, but I was always for Mads. I made that character for Mads.”

“And so, just in case Death Stranding became my last work, I wanted Lindsay to be a part of it.”

“For instance, real-life Matt smokes, but Cliff's character at that time wasn't a smoker. But after meeting Matt in person, we went through the process of solidifying his character together.”

“There was one incident that was really tough. The 2016 SAG strike. I thought it would end in two or three months, but it went on for a year.”

“I think it takes 3-5 years for a game to receive proper evaluation.”

“Well, I was already thinking about DS2 while I was making DS1. Whenever you're creating a new game or a new IP, it's difficult to establish a game system after just the first game.”

“There are very few actors like that nowadays but I see that potential in Norman which is why I didn't give him any lines.”

“Inside that room, it's not really Sam, it's basically Norman.”

“There needs to be trust between myself and the actors in order to see it through, because it can get pretty tough.”

“And in order to appeal to those who didn't play the first one, I've made the game nostalgic, but also new.”

“Sony has this new technology system called the Mado. It means window in Japanese. […] It feels like an illusion almost. Like the person on the screen is right there.”

“And Norman plays Daryl, a character that doesn't exist in the original story. And in the end, he became the main character.”

“But you know, I'll probably become an AI and stick around.”

“Hideo, what you're making is already a movie. Keep going as you are.”

“It was my first time meeting Nicolas, and yet, from that moment on, after just 20 or 30 minutes of talking, I felt like he was a childhood friend, someone I had known from ages ago.”

“I don't really tell people this, but about three years ago, I was ill for a little while. And during that time, Nicolas constantly sent me messages of encouragement.”

“And it's said that the weight of the soul is 21 grams. […] When I thought about this character, I instantly thought of Nicolas.”

“Well, I'm not an actor, so I'm just kind of there for presents. […] I've played the role of an assassin before too.”

“The only thing Nicolas and I can do for the world is create things. We aren't capable of doing anything else, so we'll probably keep making things until we die.”

“People may not use them, but I want them to feel cared for when they're here.”

“So Morricone, who changed the film music industry, influenced Hans Zimmer, who, in turn, changed the industry himself.”

“So my heroes were actors like Clint Eastwood, Franco Nero, and Lee Van Cleef, and I fell in love with Morricone's music which was used in those films.”

“Personally, I think this is the best one out of all spaghetti western films. People who aren't familiar with any spaghetti westerns should start by watching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.”

“Movies and music existed separately, but he made them into one entity. That's why I want to emulate him and combine film and video games into one.”

“So I feel like my life is following a similar path to Morricone's, especially after having watched the documentary. It made me cry.”

“I referenced it a lot in Metal Gear Solid. Snake and Otacon were really similar to Sako and Vanzetti. So I was going to make it so that in the end, since these two become fugitives, they are made to stand trial.”

“So I looked for the CD, bought it, and realised I wanted to put it into the game. It was fate that we reunited.”

“Also, the scariest movie in the whole world for me is The Exorcist. I've only ever watched it once.”

“The movie wasn't great but the music sure was. I've collected all his soundtracks.”

“There really won't be another person like him, epitomizing loneliness in his compositions. I think that's what it comes down to.”

“So in a game, I want there to be music that can stand alone and away from the game and be passed down to the next generation. That's the ideal.”

“I wouldn't say I'm collecting them, but if there's some sort of bonus item, I think my generation is just materialistic. I want my albums to come with something.”

“The album is called Wish and it was released in 1992 […] This is my favourite album of theirs. […] And actually, the song that I picked out isn't my favourite song. It's my second favourite.”

“Yes, he visited and we got to do the long-awaited 3D scan of him. […] He could be someone just walking around and you run into him if you're playing offline. He won't be part of the story.”

“Yes, to put it simply, he gets me. There aren't a lot of people like that out there. We don't have a language barrier.”

“I did scan him. […] Yeah, you'll probably show up getting a shoulder ride. If you see someone on a shoulder, you'll know it's him. Maybe I'll be the one carrying him in the CG.”

“Yeah, I scanned myself the last time around. Not this time though. In the last game, I was the one that came out of the tar.”

“And I had thought about including Octopus Lou instead, but everyone was like, uh, that might be tough. I thought it would be okay to use Octopus Lou anyway, but I ended up pulling back.”

“It inspired Death Stranding 2's Who Am I, Where Am I, How Come and Why Me campaign.”

“It's fine to complain, like in your own living room, but don't do it where I can hear it. I wish people would stop directing those messages at me.”

“You're just watching my face though. What's the fun in that? I'm not an idol or anything. […] But when I checked the footage, all I saw was my belly and stuff like that.”

“But I really wanted to put in an Asian character, and if I'm going to use an Asian actor, I wanted them to be Japanese because, well, um, I'm Japanese.”

“Um, on another note, with the current technology, we can't shoot hair. So all we can do is take reference shots, and we later punch in one hair at a time.”

“We do it once like an air hug, where you hug from a distance. And then we do it again without the helmet.”

“Well, compared to like Clint Eastwood, I might be more stubborn. There are some people who will do 30 takes. James Cameron does over 30. […] Well, I think the first two or three takes are the best ones.”

“And you put all your thoughts into it, but there's a limit to what you can create on your own. The characters start lacking features. I think I only know about 20 to 30 different personalities.”

“And actors can't do exactly the same thing every time, every take. Their expression may change slightly and that little nuance makes me really happy.”

“In my case, I think about the world setting, then create the story. The character settings are pretty vague at first. The details aren't refined yet.”

“You can also see the background and where the enemy is located. It doesn't exist in the studio, but it appears on the screen.”

“We didn't use an actual cardboard box. We made one out of poles.”

“I need to check whether I can love this person or not, whether or not I can work together with them.”

“At the end, when we wrap up all the shooting, we'll do the usual celebrations with bouquet and stuff and everyone is all happy. But then it's hell from there. It'll take another two more years after that.”

“But it's meaningless if you lose your own colour in the process, so you have to find a place for yourself among the symphony but bring out the Japanese part of yourself too. Like, you can hear a Japanese flute from within the symphony.”

“I think I'm gonna re-write the script now, I have new ideas after meeting you.”

“One of my favourite movies is Mary Shelley. I saw that in theatres, and that did it for me. I knew it right there and then.”

“So I change stuff during performance captures and whatnot, but on top of that, I want the actors, like Elle for example, to be a part of the creative process by participating as a creator.”

“I make the games as I film the cutscenes, and the staff and I give each other feedback to make sure we keep consistency throughout the game.”

“It's not about who it actually is, but more so who you want it to be. That's the question I was asking to the world. And their answer was Elle Fanning.”

“Putting Elle in a video game is a big responsibility on my part, so I wanted to make something that will live up to her expectations.”

“But I don't remember exactly how we first met. I feel like I've known him from ages ago.”

“In MGS5, Snake isn't really Snake, and Ocelot becomes kind of like the storyteller. And this was really difficult and playing the part of Ocelot was risky, but Troy did an amazing job, so I'm really grateful.”

“For instance, when Higgs turns to the player and speaks in their direction, he looks at the camera all of a sudden, sort of breaking the fourth wall. Something like that is hard for movie actors to understand, but Troy gets it right away.”

“A good movie, a good game, a good story does not hold up without a good villain.”

“But in my original concept, there was no singing involved. I knew that Troy could sing, and he even sang to his fans around the world during the pandemic. I listened to that many times.”

“I also think that, ultimately, this was the first step in proclaiming that games are just like movies, and that they are all entertainment.”

“So, we could put audio on there, and now games could talk. No one had made anything with CD-ROMs yet.”

“I was basically scammed. I didn't know anything. I didn't even know how recording worked.”

“I was roaming in the dark and you were like the beacon of light leading the way with your smile and everything.”

“And I would ask them to do another take, but they would say, there wasn't anything wrong with that take and everyone would kinda agree, but Kikuko, you would stand up for me.”

“Personally, I thought that Snatcher was not a success.”

“So this is why I started going to dinners with cast members. […] But this kind of work style of mine started from here.”

“With Policenauts, I made almost everything on my own. So it's really my blood, sweat and tears.”

“Yeah, well, Kayumi-san is like a god to me.”

“I realized you had to do it directly, which is my current style. If the actual person says they can't do it, then I will give it up.”

“You decided to become freelance at the height of your popularity. That's so risky, yet so bold.”

“You may be playing the hero in the video game, but what if the girl you were in relationship with called you to ask stuff like, 'Do you like me?' or 'Don't you remember me?' We never had a character like that.”

“The boss is kind of mysterious. She's maternal, but she's also like the father figure.”

“We used like 500 or 600 eggs, but we couldn't throw them out, so the staff was going to eat them.”

“In my first idea, Chiko was alive but has become a deranged killer. He was supposed to appear as someone violently killing people, kind of like Christopher Walken's character in The Deer Hunter.”

“But I wanted to see a Kikuko version of Lindsay. So I asked you to play the two roles of Amelie and Brigitte.”

“We made the CG based off of Otsuka-san and Ginga-san's voices.”

“In Spain, there was a huge line to buy the game because it was the first time that a Spanish audio game was released in the country of Spain.”

“It actually wasn't Amelie. It was Mama and Lakne, the twins, played by Margaret Qualley.”

“Your name will be Seventeen. […] There'll be an oi oi button. If the players press that, they get a like. But they have to press it at just the right timing.”

“I originally discovered CHVRCHES in 2015. I had a lot going on in my life at that time. I decided to go to a CD shop and I listened to a sample of CHVRCHES' second album. That's when I became a fan.”

“I didn't expect Metal Gear Solid 2 to sell very well, so I did a lot of crazy things in that game. Following Metal Gear Solid 2, though, a lot of pressure was on my shoulders. I couldn't be quite as free after that.”

“Since I was a fan of theirs, I didn't want to kill their sound. I wanted to make the most out of what makes CHVRCHES special and create something that'll match Death Stranding.”

“Yeah, it made me happier than receiving the actual trophy. […] Don't say that to Jeff.”

“In 2021, my staff was still working from home because of the pandemic, so I was the only one coming to the office. I would listen to that album while working.”

“Having one song in the game is expected, right? So what if we had you make like 100 songs or something? I don't know, but just something no one else is doing.”

“I think, ultimately, Kojima Productions will end up being just me and AI. My staff is in the room right now, so I'm sorry to say this, but what I want to do is create a simulation databank of me.”

“Maybe if you're with someone, but you want them to leave the room, the words get out will keep playing over and over again. And it never gets to the chorus of the song.”

“I didn't know his work at the time but we met up and did introductions and right away he let me listen to a sample of his latest album. One listened to that, and I was captivated.”

“Since you're the creator of the song, you're probably the number one listener of Goliath. But the person who listened to it the second most is me. I listen to it 50 or 60 times a day.”

“I thought you were my doppelganger or something, though we are 20 years apart in age. […] I'm convinced we're originally the same person.”

“Music, sound effects, audio in general makes up about 70% of a piece of work, including silence. […] Yes, silence is a sound.”

“I can't say what project it is, although I'm sure you all can guess. But there was a song that fit perfectly in this one scene. So I asked him, hey, can I use this?”

“People often describe it as like a chemical reaction. Like A and B react to create C or D. What Woodkid and I are doing is like a DNA modification. It's like something completely new that doesn't exist in this world is born every time.”

“Okay, now you cry [...] I have to get in the mood but in the whole suit.”

“If it says "A Hideo Kojima Game", it means that from start to finish, I'm involved in everything, that's the declaration. "A Hideo Kojima Game" means we cannot cut corners.”

“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.”

“And Sony, as far as I know, basically said, "We're going to bet on you, Hideo Kojima, as a creator." We don't even need to know what the game is. We're just in.”

“When I first explained this to my staff, I got a largely negative response. They said, "But no one does that..."”

“I wanted to offer another way, which is why I made Death Stranding.”

“The player is the only one making the connections, so the sense of loneliness is torturous at the start.”

“I believe there's a moment of awakening that we get from any good work,”

“But when I was alone, I would hold my knees and listen to music and cry.”

“The truth is that because my dad died, I was able to get into the game industry. ... If my dad was alive, he'd have been opposed. He was a very scary man.”

“My mother was the only one who didn't object for some reason. "If you want to pursue it, that's fine."”

“I was having so much fun that I hardly slept at all.”

“But if you say, "It's visually different from anything that exists", they can't visualize it.”

“But now it's my own company... so if I mess up, there won't be a next project.”

“but I do it on my own, so I do them all in parallel. ... This is probably only possible within my own studio.”

“I have on average 200 problems at once to do with details of the game, and it's up to me to make decisions on all of them. ... Sometimes I do bug checks in my dreams.”

“I like film directors such as David Lynch and Cronenberg. Keeping things edgy, but still appealing to mass audiences. They're the games I want to create.”

“For me, films are the sun. It's like plant photosynthesis with sunbeams.”

“Things that leave a deep impression on me, like Kubrick, are innovative or new things. They can split opinion. But ultimately, it's precisely these things that stay with you.”

“They were the kind of people that I wanted to work with. ... I wanted to do something with them that probed slightly deeper.”

“Most games look so similar, you can't even tell their title from looking at a scene. The newer it is, the more they fear it.”

“Making war games felt uncomfortable as my parents had experienced war. ... so that's why I tried putting in the anti-war, anti-nuclear themes into my games.”

“My home was close to the sea, and it left a very strong impression on me.”

“It became a habit which I still have. ... I'd think up stories because I had so much time alone.”

“When you are creating things, you need references from other genres.”

“Every time our eyes met, I thought I had to buy something, and that, for me, was a science fiction book.”

“As I reflect on that time, maybe it was my escape from reality.”

“It was like I saw the future. ... Technology would connect the world.”

“If I confess, at that point, my thoughts have already turned to the next idea.”

“We've taken a first step, a giant leap in the entertainment industry.”

“I was pleased to receive messages from people who felt the game saved them because the game indirectly connected them to others. That was my motivation for creating things in the first place.”

“But one thing that troubles me is that I turn 59 this year. I'm wondering how many I'll have time to make. ... That sense of fear has come over me just recently, I haven't had it before.”

“It's limitless and you never get bored of it. It's irresistible fun.”

“I work as closely as possible to my staff and make detailed adjustments every day. ... But I don't think this way of working is common these days.”

Kojima, raised in Kansai, says he loves Osaka's takoyaki and Kobe's akashiyaki; he recounts that there the custom is to make them yourself, with 'takoyaki parties' in which each friend brings ingredients, and that for him they were special precisely because they demand achieving the perfect sphere.

“I had the story written before the pandemic, but after experiencing the pandemic I just rewrote the whole story from scratch. I also didn't want to predict any more future, so I rewrote it.”

“a new form of media”

“[OD] is a game, don't get me wrong, but it's at the same time a movie, but at the same time a new form of media”

“so this collaboration will be really awesome”

“I can say that from the first moment I played Metal Gear Solid 2, I knew I was experiencing the work of an artist whose craft just hits different.”

“The films they are delivering to the world are high in quality and very innovative. I have been attracted to their creations and they have even inspired my own work.”

“There are a lot of "game adaptation films" out there but what we are creating is not just a direct translation of the game. The intention is that our audience will not only be fans of the games, but our film will be for anyone who loves cinema.”

“He is my God, and the SAGA that he tells is my Bible”

“Every time I say something about that game [Death Stranding] on the internet or a talk show or whatever and Hideo hasn't said it first, he calls and he yells at me. So I'm not saying anything. He's yelled at me several times.”

“When I had just started my own studio and had nothing, I pitched the DS project to Norman at a sushi restaurant and asked him if he would like to do it with me. He instantly said yes even though I didn't even have a script.”

Kojima wrote that shaving every morning upon waking was a pleasant way to start the day, and that although he now wears a neat three-day stubble he still keeps that morning ritual of tidying it immediately after getting up.

Kojima describes the family house in Kawanishi (Hyogo) where he lived from fifth grade: his room and his brother’s were symmetrical, separated by a sliding door, with identical beds facing each other, and when they slept they could hear each other’s breathing and even what they said in their dreams. After dinner, the bath and the living-room TV were finished, the children would shut themselves in their room and turn on the radiocassette; as a result he developed the habit of lying on his bed and listening to the radio.

“I create films and art within the medium of games. This is not a conscious choice, it is simply an inevitable result.”

Around March 2025, around his appearance at SXSW, Kojima announced that Death Stranding had surpassed 20 million players across all platforms; he said that people still playing it makes him the happiest.

“Music accounts for 80% of what moves people emotionally. I hope that the songs, whether they are songs that play in moments of solitude or ones that evoke cinematic spectacle, I hope that they will touch your hearts.”

For Death Stranding 2, Kojima had to turn down around half of the cameo requests from famous people: scanning each person in the studio took about fifteen minutes, and the team ran out of space on the project.

For Death Stranding 2, Kojima wanted Sam (played by Norman Reedus) to have his hair and beard grow in real time, with the player shaving or cutting them at a mirror; he discarded the idea, among other reasons, because he did not want to harm a superstar like Reedus.

On his radio show KOJI10, Kojima described two game ideas he would probably never make: a "forgetting" game in which, if you stop playing for a while, the protagonist gradually forgets information and mechanics — even how to move — to the point that you’d almost have to take a week off to play it; and a life simulator in which the character ages from baby to elderly, with mobility and vision deteriorating, which Kojima joked no one would buy.

“I don't want them to just manage our existing IP”

“I'm getting older, and I'd prefer to do it while I'm still young!”

“I gave a USB stick with all my ideas on it to my personal assistant, kind of like a will.”

“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?”

“I could probably make games in space. I want to be the first.”

Asked by GQ, Kojima named as his four favorite films 2001: A Space Odyssey, Taxi Driver, Mad Max 2 and High and Low, although he clarified that his top four changes all the time.

“I want to die making something.”

“Coincidence and traveling are very important to living creatures… if we just connect via the internet, we will lose that.”

“People think I just want to be famous, right? But no—I want to raise the bar for gaming, and game creators.”

“If Scorsese's doing it, I can't criticize Scorsese. He's the second god. The first is George Miller.”

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

“is really what I'm scared of the most”

“I am not going to pass the baton to anyone. I will rather crush the baton [...] I don't need to give 'Hideo Kojima' to anyone.”

“Every day, if I tweet something that I like, a director or an actor or a musician contacts me. They say, 'I'm a creator because of your games.' But they didn't receive the baton of Hideo Kojima. They received my small fire.”

“If everyone likes it, it means it's mainstream. It means it's conventional. It means it's already pre-digested for people to like it.”

“I want people to end up liking things they didn't like when they first encountered it, because that's where you really end up loving something.”

“There's a key moment where we had a discussion, probably halfway [through] when we were doing the game, where he came to me and he said, "We have a problem."”

“We met before the pandemic, and he used some of my songs in the first episode [Death Stranding], but it was songs from my previous records. He used "Goliath" and "Pale Yellow" in the gameplay.”

“It was almost like planting seeds, and then he would grow the garden.”

“When we started working on the song with Hideo, he's like, "Should we have her sing it?" It was like, "Yes, I was dreaming for you to ask for it."”

“You have no idea how much he doesn't give a shit about this. He really doesn't. He doesn't compromise; he does what he wants.”

“People sometimes have the fake impression that Hideo is very egotistical, [but] he's someone that changes his mind very intelligently based on what people bring him.”

“I was listening to Caroline Polachek last year and became a big fan of hers. After I put that on my Instagram, she contacted me, and then she DM'ed. We kept in touch and then eventually met up in Paris, and that's when she told me she wanted to write a new song for Death Stranding 2.”

“I put all of these things in. Even if I said to the staff, 'Please put them in!', they would just say, 'Huh?' and pretend not to know (laughs).”

“When I see movies and get ideas, usually just talking to people, eating or walking, or maybe I'm in a bath, I come up with these ideas. So it's almost like a disease, I call it. Even when I'm talking with my family, in my head, I'm in a totally different world.”

“Hideo kept pushing me to make something even more deconstructed and crazy and industrial and radical and I went way further than I thought I would be able to do in my music and still recognize my music.”

“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,”

“we've actually never spoken together. [I] don't speak Japanese and Hideo doesn't speak English. So, we communicate through music and images, through emotions rather than words”

For the tenth anniversary of Kojima Productions, at the «Beyond the Strand» event in September 2025, Kojima announced, in addition to video games, an augmented reality game with Niantic, an official sake called ZAKU LUDENS, and a branded credit card with the bank Mitsubishi UFJ.

“It's almost like a disease. I'm imagining things all the time. Even when I'm talking to my family, in my head I'm in a totally different world.”

Kojima's father worked for a pharmaceutical company and was an obsessive film fan; from Kojima's childhood he showed him a wide range of films and explained them. The family moved to the Kansai region when his father was transferred for work.

While in middle school, Kojima's father suddenly collapsed and died in front of him. For economic reasons he gave up his dream of becoming a novelist or film director, and after graduating from university in 1986 he joined Konami.

At Lucca Comics & Games 2025, Kojima updated his old line about being made of film: he said that of the 70% of films he carries inside, 35% is made up of Italian cinema.

Kojima says he has a much more sensitive sense of smell than other people, to the point of sometimes feeling unwell from odors, and that when he rides his company's elevator he can sometimes identify who rode before him from the lingering scent.

“The book includes a selection from "70% of My Body Is Made of Movies," which was published years ago by Sony Magazines, film critiques I wrote for Bunshun Online after becoming independent, novel afterwords and contributions, a collection of comments from 'Hideo's Mysteries,' travel essays serialized in the Nikkei Sunday edition newspaper, and essays about Kōbō Abe, among others.”

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was nominated in seven major categories at The Game Awards 2025, including Game of the Year, but did not win any awards; the main prize went to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Kojima's debut as a voice actor — his first time voicing a character in an animated film — was in the Japanese dub of Zootopia 2 (Zootrópolis 2), in which he voices Paul Molebrandt, nicknamed the Mole, a minor IT department employee at the Zootopia Police Department; the Japanese release was 5 December 2025. Recalling his participation in Zootopia 2 on KOJI10, Kojima said he was not told which character he would voice until he arrived for the recording.

“I saw a religious painting and from there, I pictured "Death Stranding." ... My interpretations can be way off, but they inspire me.”

“their works still resonate with people. It's like they are still alive today.”

“I keep my ears open for music for my games and then reach out to musicians. If we click, then we work together.”

“I bought the second generation Walkman in college. ... Looking at the views with music on was like having a soundtrack. ... iPod was released, and I moved to digital. Meanwhile, Sony released their digital Walkman.”

“I started to go see foreign movies from 5th grade, and always bought the movie pamphlets. I still have all of them.”

“In 1970, there was the Osaka Expo. My parents gave me a small Ricoh camera ... That's how it all started.”

“I keep it in my bag everyday and take it with me on business trips, too. ... My kids had sports day at school. It had to be light and with autofocus ... The ease of use was a deciding factor for me.”

“I am subscribed to Apple Music, where I listen to new songs and then buy CDs and vinyl records. ... Liner notes are a must. ... I spend most of my income on releases like these. I used to spend hours at Tower Records and vinyl shops”

“My dad got me a watch when I was in 5th grade. ... It made me feel like an adult for the first time.”

“I even used to grind the beans myself, but recently, I just use Nespresso. ... I drink about maybe 7 cups a day? ... for the last 30 years, I take it black. I used to live in Kobe. They have the best coffee.”

“I can't live without cotton swabs. ... The cotton swabs at the hotels in the US and Europe are rather big. My ear canals are quite narrow. ... I hope this brand stays in business.”

“I think my sense of smell is more sensitive than most people. ... I can even tell who was in the elevator before me ... I know what perfumes my staff use. I'm like a dog, I guess. I keep it a secret of which perfume I use.”

“I love museums, so I go every week. ... I go straight to the gift shop, buy these items, and read them at cafes. ... I love Buddhist statues too, so I buy the catalogs. ... postcards and plastic file folders. I sort of collect them”

“The game industry took a toll on my eyes. I started wearing glasses when I was about 30.”

“I'm not a fan of scarves. I don't like stuff around my neck. However, this neck gaiter is an exception. ... I received this neck gaiter back in the day, and I've been using it ever since. I keep it in my bag”

“I used to carry a video camera too, but now I just use my phone. Back in the day, I used to be into taking videos.”

“I'm not especially partial to wireless Bluetooth earbuds. These are from a Chinese brand called NICEHCK. Their sound quality is just superb. It was always my ultimate go-to pair and the brand reached out to collaborate.”

“This is the score to "Death Stranding 2" by Woodkid on vinyl. The "Jaws" score by John Williams. ... A single by Koji Tamaki. The Japanese edition of the Last Dinner Party's new album. ... Spandau Ballet is a band from my youth. A CD box set.”

“This watch is a collaboration piece by Seiko and Kojima Productions. My first watch was a Seiko. It brings back memories. ... To sync it on a business trip ... I have to go outside but it doesn't always work. Hence my collaboration watch with Hamilton. ... I adjust this manually.”

“I admired TAG HEUER because it was worn by Steve McQueen or by 007 ... I bought watches worn by movie actors or popular stars. ... Although a Rolex can save your life from the yakuza, as it was written in a book by Teru Miyamoto. I was tempted to try it, but I stuck with my favorite watch.”

“The first one I bought myself was for "The Towering Inferno." ... he said "Hideo, you don't need it. I've already got one." I didn't want to share it, and it made me angry ... So, I stopped going to the movies with my brother. I went alone and bought the pamphlet by myself.”

“We've been collaborating for a long time. We devised a few pairs that consolidates into one. In the past, we made one where the lenses open to the side. But they were unstable when it was windy. ... The visors that change color from "2001: A Space Odyssey" would be cool but hard to achieve.”

“Some people from around the world have started to cosplay as me. So, I've been considering switching to contacts. And maybe shave my beard.”

“I hate the cold ... I actually like winter. I don't like summer so much. Fall is my favorite season.”

“Saw Captain Marvel.”

“Unlike last year, like I was traveling all over the world, this year will be about staying grounded and laying solid foundations. [...] This year also marks my 40th anniversary in the game industry from 1986 and began my journey in game creation.”

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.

“Watched 'Return to Silent Hill' on Amazon Prime”

“This is the PC Launch Trailer for "DEATH STRANDING 2 ON THE BEACH." Once again, I did the structure, editing, sound design, and mix myself. It features a track by WOODKID.”

In 2026, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach won the Artistic Achievement award at the BAFTA Games Awards.

“But in 50 years, 100 years, I don't know. Maybe AI could create art, but while I live, I don't think I'll see it. I'm not interested in it.”

“I pitched to many people, to the big companies, and also to the up-and-coming companies. All of them said the same thing... They said that I'm crazy, and that they really don't understand the concept — that they will not be able to do it.”

“Currently, I've been buying up a lot of Blu-rays, such as various movies, and CDs too. [...] So, what is happening to video games in 2028, might also happen to movies.”

At the Il Cinema in Piazza festival in Rome, Kojima said he has always thought he wants to die in a movie theater, specifically at the moment just before the film begins, after the trailers and commercials have played.

“I made a cameo appearance in Episode 11 of TBS’s Sunday Theater drama, “VIVANT.” For the role, I took off my glasses, slicked my hair back, got into costume, and gave it my best, but it was decided that I looked “too young” to be the Superintendent General of the Metropolitan Police Department, and that “there are no real-life examples of one with a beard.” So they adjusted my appearance with CGI. See if you can spot me.”

Norman Reedus took a photo of Kojima in the cafeteria on the set of “The Walking Dead.” The photo also appears in Reedus’s photography book; Kojima said he still had some muscle back then.

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.

Kojima expressed nostalgia for the atmosphere of the Showa era and said he could not resist purchasing Volume 2 of the “Taiyo ni Hoero!” DVD collection. He evoked its streets, signs, fashion, hairstyles, cars, police cruisers, black rotary phones, red pay phones, phone booths, tobacco, hi-lite cigarettes, electric fans, cafes, amusement parks, and the warmth of the people. He clarified that he would not go so far as to say those days were better, but that everything felt nostalgic. That night he would watch episode 5, featuring Keiko Sekine—now Keiko Takahashi—of whom he had been a huge fan at the time; Shohei Hino also makes a guest appearance.

Kojima finished reading the advance proof of Chris Whitaker’s novel “All the Colors of the Dark.” He said Whitaker elevates mystery into literature and described the novel as a story that made him emotionally invested in its characters, kept him turning the pages despite not wanting it to end and feeling dread in its latter half, and ultimately bathes the reader in a “color of hope” beneath human darkness. He called it the best book he had read that year.

In mid-June 2026, PlayStation Studios notified Kojima and KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS that it would cancel PHYSINT. The project was important both to Kojima and to his studio. After three months of searching for a new partner, Kojima and his team found a shared vision with XBOX and decided to work together again. Development of PHYSINT continues.

KOJI10 is tentatively coming back with a special one-off podcast that, in VIVANT style, they are calling Episode 36. Kojima and Yanpi had been working on a comeback plan for some time and are rebooting KOJI10 with this standalone episode for now.

Kojima created both the new key visual for PHYSINT and its copy. The tagline is “The Next Cold War Begins.”

Kojima coined the original term “PHYSINT” himself.

“We sign contracts according to projects, and that's how we survive one by one as an indie. So I need to find a new project before the previous project ends, and that's how we stay alive.”

“But the number one priority is my staff. We have about 200 people, and I expanded because we had Physint. […] I didn't want to do the same thing we did for P.T.”

“True story: after the meeting, the first thing I did was, I came back to my desk, and I started to write and add a little bit more to the concept for Physint.”

“But if Kojima Productions collapses, that doesn’t follow this trend at all. It’s a step backwards for indies. So I needed to stand firm and continue this project.”

“I'm making this new IP, and I want to consider everything like movies, dramas, anime, TV, comics, music. Let's create a new IP with all of this included.”

“I predicted that people might leave, but no one did.”

“So the work didn’t stop. […] I have to change the story depending on how the game experiment works.”

“They haven't contacted me ever since. But I'm not fighting with Sony. We're not in a dispute. […] So if this was the conclusion, I would've wanted to hear it a little earlier.”

“I want to do something new. But I saw so many people requesting it. And I was thinking, maybe I only have 10 years left. […] And we shook hands and that's how the partnership started.”

“These days of digital production, we could actually kind of use the same assets for a movie and a game. […] Of course, I'll release the game first probably!”

In a statement supplied to IGN after the interview, Kojima Productions urged scepticism toward unofficial explanations for Physint’s change of partner. The studio said it was healthy and profitable, that development was continuing with Xbox and that its relationship with PlayStation remained strong.

Kojima finished reading William Hussey’s “Killing Jericho.” He said he totally agreed with Akiyuki Sengai’s recommendation for fans of classic mystery and that the book was really good. He described the story as being based on the history of Britain’s Traveller community and travelling fairs and told in the first person by a former police officer who has fallen on hard times; he said it initially feels like an old-fashioned hard-boiled detective story but balances serial-killer elements, clever mystery solving, and Deaver-like twists. He said the ending would surprise readers and that he was looking forward to reading more of the series.

Kojima finished reading Thomas Knüwer’s “Das Haus in dem Gudelia stirbt” (“The House Where Gudelia Dies”). He described it as a German mystery about Gudelia, a lonely 81-year-old woman who narrates in the first person the sad past behind her attachment to a house, in a story moving between 2024, 1998, and 1984 whose present-day events unfold during a devastating flood. He said it is not the kind of mystery that begins with a dead body and proceeds through an investigation by a detective or police officer; he said that from around the middle it makes the reader reluctant to learn the answer to what happened and that, rather than being a whodunit, it goes deeper into both the human side of the story and the mystery itself. He recommended it.

Kojima found a new edition of Seicho Matsumoto’s “Amsterdam Unga Satsujin Jiken” at a bookstore and picked it up. He called it a nostalgic find and remembered reading the Kappa Novels edition as a child, borrowing the copy his mother was reading.

Kojima watched David Ayer’s “Heart of the Beast.” He described it as a story about a veteran and a former military reconnaissance dog, both suffering from PTSD, trying to survive and make their way home while the beautiful but unforgiving Alaskan wilderness stands in their way. He said there was very little dialogue but that the strong bond between the two, Brad Pitt and the dog, could really be felt. He admitted that the film made him cry, that the dog’s name, “Odin,” hit like a body blow at the end, and that it was a shame they did not make a program for the film.

Kojima finished reading Eric Heisserer’s “Simultaneous” during the flight. He explained that the novel begins with reincarnation and past-life regression before becoming intertwined with a series of murders, and identified its distinctive concept of “simultaneous lives,” in which multiple people in the same generation share a single soul. He said the novel is driven less by its lore or world-building than by its cinematic, Nolan-esque narrative momentum, and also feels cinematic because the threat of an unknown serial killer is confronted by an investigator, a counselor, and an ordinary patient rather than by a vast government conspiracy or institution.

Kojima found in his storage the booklet included with the MGS2 limited edition, the MGS3 pamphlet he and his team handed out at E3, and the booklet included with the ANUBIS limited edition. He recalled that they used to make everything in-house at the time. The early visual concept for MGS3 was designed by Kyle. Harry was born in 1961, Kyle in 1962, and Kojima in 1963; MGS3 is set in 1964.

“People are still playing it. I get the numbers every day. Very few players drop off. The people who love it keep playing.”

“I want to keep quiet and release it. That's unusual for me, isn't it?”

“Before someone calls "Action!" she seems like an ordinary person. Then the camera rolls, and she transforms. She'll do anything. It's remarkable.”

“I'd like to put a bed in the middle of a bookstore and sleep there.”

“I have towers of unread books at home – like a whole skyline. […] Then there's my "books I must read" pile.”

“But I grew up watching Hitchcock and little surprises like that are fun, aren't they?”

“I don't like playing myself, though. That happens a lot.”

“And we're making two animated projects. […] A film and a series. They're progressing well, too.”

“To give them freedom. […] But when they ask, I start getting nitpicky. […] Like, "I would do it this way." […] I don't really want to do that.”

“With Norman, since we’re working with him, of course we’re going to handle with care how he looks, down to every baby hair.”

“AI could do that easily. But as the person who made the original, I wouldn't want someone changing it too much. […] There was a reason I chose a particular lighting setup. It would be different if AI understood those intentions. […] I wouldn't like that. Unless I was controlling the AI in my own work, that may be different.”

“I pitched him the game, and he agreed to do it.”

“He keeps asking me for the script. […] I have the plot ready. But he wants to know the lines and how his character speaks. […] He asks me to write it but I'm like, "Hold on!"”

“We captured how fabric wrinkles and catches light. We'll change the designs.”

“I took that photo.”

“I pitch the projects myself, too.”

“We've finally started. We've been shooting since June and will continue through the end of the year.”

“I asked who would be good for the lead. He said, "Sophia Lillis, obviously!"”

“I knew I wanted to work with Udo, but where in the world was he? […] Then Guillermo del Toro suddenly... sent him an email. […] And he answered right away.”

“She looked after Udo throughout the three-day scan.”

“You enter through Phase One. […] It starts with our independence, in a small four-and-a-half-tatami room.”

“From the first “DEATH STRANDING”... […] we have work we made before we even had an engine. […] There were only five or six of us.”

“Then I'd like to experience weightlessness.”

“I'd also like to make a game to play in zero gravity. […] So the controls would have to change. […] I'd work out the gameplay and the controls.”

Kojima said he had watched the first four episodes of Mike Flanagan’s “Carrie” and was really enjoying it. He explained that Flanagan had brought the classic into the world of today’s high schools and reconstructed it for a new generation, exploring social media, the current education system, the struggles and crises facing young people, and each character’s background. He said what he found most interesting was the portrayal of Carrie not as a terrifying monster but as an innocent human being treated with sincerity and compassion; he also praised Summer H. Howell and said he could not wait to see what happened next.

Kojima and his team released a limited-edition merchandise set when they became independent. At the time, they only had the KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS logo; they had the design for Ludens, but the CG model had not yet been created.

Kojima read Akira Otani’s “Rurika, Born 2019, Turns 50” in one sitting. He said that, having grown up reading Koontz and McCammon, he felt a sense of nostalgia as he turned the pages. He explained that the novel’s tone was closer to shonen manga and anime than to the “modern horror” that took his generation by storm in the 1980s, and that it had Otani’s distinctive storytelling style. He said that, in contrast to the countless twentieth-century works of science fiction inspired by fear of a “population explosion,” the novel takes a meta perspective on life after retirement in Japan’s super-aged society.

Kojima said he had waited until the interview was released before posting his thoughts on director Iñárritu’s “DIGGER.” He said everyone living in today’s world should see it and described it as a work that remains with its audience, provokes reflection, and sounds alarms; he added that absorbing and carrying the film would shape a tool for delving deeper into the future and that the film would stay by the viewer’s side for years.

Kojima described Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s DIGGER as a frightening film that turns things actually happening into comedy, rather than depicting falling meteorites or attacking aliens. He was surprised by its dual structure of film and theatre: the theatrical performance ultimately appears as the past, not the future.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s DIGGER reminded Kojima of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and the BBC nuclear-war drama Threads. Tom Cruise’s monologue also brought Chaplin’s The Great Dictator to mind.

In his conversation with Alejandro G. Iñárritu about DIGGER, Kojima recalled depicting social media taking on a kind of life in Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001), something he felt had now become reality. He saw a structural similarity with DIGGER: untruths swell until they change politics and daily life, leaving people feeling as though they are on a stage being moved by some other force.

Kojima compared criticism of DIGGER by people who had not seen it with people calling Death Stranding a walking simulator without playing it, as though they had. He said the label still persisted and that this was particularly frightening.

Kojima feared that AI in social media would show people only the things and opinions they like, shutting out different perspectives and chance encounters. He imagined AI acting as a concierge, leading people to eat only their favourites and meet only those who share their opinions; he likened this to DIGGER’s characters being manipulated by someone whose identity they do not know.

Kojima watched “Love of Your Life” on Prime Video and said it was wonderful. He said the film brings together everything that makes Margaret Qualley compelling, calling her performance mature and her screen presence explosive. He compared her role as an ordinary woman to her role in “Maid” (2021), a series he said he loved; he described the film as tracing one woman’s love, loss, and renewal over seven years amid beautiful landscapes and changing seasons. He said there were moments that moved him to tears, highly recommended the film, and noted that it also features Aaron Pierre.

Kojima said he went to the Japan premiere of “Godzilla Minus Zero” at TOHO Cinemas Hibiya. He described himself as a huge Godzilla fan and a fan of Minami Hamabe, said he had been eagerly waiting three years to see the film, and got to see it in IMAX. He said there were moments that played out just as he imagined, moments that surprised him in the best possible way, moments beyond anything he could have imagined, and scenes for hardcore fans that brought tears to his eyes or that he had always dreamed of seeing brought to life. He said the final climax made him extremely excited, that the film also had a little of the “Always: Sunset on Third Street” feeling, perhaps because it was directed by Takashi Yamazaki, and that he intended to see it a few more times in IMAX after its release.

Kojima got up early and watched Episode 2 of the TBS drama “LOST10” on streaming. Kojima said the series had not lost any momentum from Episode 1 to Episode 2 and was getting even more interesting; he highlighted its transition from sweeping aerial shots of the Hokkaido wilderness in Episode 1 to the eye-level perspective used in Episode 2 to explore the human drama and the truth behind the incident. Kojima said he started watching “LOST10” because he is a fan of Ryusei Yokohama and that he really liked the contrast, as a duo, between Yokohama’s character, a detective in Hokkaido, and Shun Oguri’s character, an insurance investigator. He called the series a winner and said he would watch the rest.

Kojima picked up a copy of anan at a bookstore. Kojima said he has an ongoing essay series in anan and that episode 43 is about suitcases.

That night, in memory of Chiba-sensei, Kojima was rereading the José Mendoza world title match from “Ashita no Joe,” the manga that defined his youth, and rewatching Episodes 44–47 of “Ashita no Joe 2.”