connection

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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)”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

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.

“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.”

“[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”

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.”

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 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’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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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”

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

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.

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.”

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“I feel always lonely in society”

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.

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 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”

“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.'”

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.

“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.”

“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.”

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.

“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.”

“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 really recommend it either. Mr. Oshii says that you should play offline and just watch the story on YouTube.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Should We Have Connected?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

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.

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

“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.”

“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.”

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 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.

“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.”

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 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's parents began a nightly tradition of watching a film with their children; the children were not allowed to go to bed until the film had finished.

Kojima wrote that Policenauts was also a meeting place: thanks to that magnetic field he met Shinkawa and the rest of the core staff of what would later become his studio, and many people inside and outside the company who still support him; he concluded it is a road that connects to the present and a past he can no longer return to, but that work still shines with a strong light.

“It was my first game that made it to release, so I have a lot of memories. It's my cute boy in that sense.”

“By the way, I'm developing this game called Snake's Revenge, but I know it's not the authentic Snake, so please create a new Snake game of your own.”

“I thought it was very faithful to the Metal Gear concept. I enjoyed it.”