creativity

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

“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.”

“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.”

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.”

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.

“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.”

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

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.”

“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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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).

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 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.

“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.”

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.”

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.

“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.”

“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.

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.”

“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.”

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.

“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.”

“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’m back”

“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.”

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 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.

“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.'”

“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.”

“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!”

“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.”

“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.

“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”

“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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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”

“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”

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

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.”

“I want to die making something.”

“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."”

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

“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.”

“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,”

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.”

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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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”

“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 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.”

“Saw Captain Marvel.”

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

“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.”

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

“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 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 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.

“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?”

“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.”

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

“I took that photo.”

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

“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 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.

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.

Kojima is a video game designer, writer, director, and producer, best known for the Metal Gear franchise and for Death Stranding; he heads his own independent studio, Kojima Productions.

Kojima’s first games as a director were for MSX and computers: Metal Gear (1987), his directorial debut, with which he established the stealth game genre; Snatcher (1988), a graphic adventure with a cinematic presentation inspired by films like Blade Runner; Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990); and Policenauts (1994), another graphic adventure that he designed, wrote and directed.

The Metal Gear Solid saga, which Kojima directed, produced, designed and wrote, runs from Metal Gear Solid (1998, PlayStation) — the jump to 3D that established him — through Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001), Metal Gear Solid 3 (2004), Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008), and Peace Walker (2010), to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015). He announced that The Phantom Pain would be his final Metal Gear project.

Kojima created and directed the video games Metal Gear (1987), Snatcher (1988), Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990), Policenauts (1994), Metal Gear Solid (1998), Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001), Metal Gear Solid 3 (2004), Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008), Peace Walker (2010), Metal Gear Solid V (2014–2015), P.T. (2014), Death Stranding (2019) and Death Stranding 2 (2025); he has OD and Physint in development. He has also produced or supervised other video games such as Zone of the Enders, the Boktai series, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and Metal Gear Rising.

In a text written for Konami's website, Kojima described Policenauts as his most difficult birth: it took four years from planning to the first commercialization and six years in total including later conversions. During that time his department changed three times, and the organization, his position and his work environment changed repeatedly, while the world moved — the Berlin Wall disappeared and the Cold War structure collapsed — and they were also struck by a large, unexpected earthquake.

Kojima wrote that during those six turbulent years he kept creating Policenauts as if possessed, and that although the project many times came close to running aground, curiously he never gave up even once; he added that even today he does not really understand how he could concentrate for so long on a single imaginary world.

Kojima wrote that at that time he devoted himself solely to finishing the work, living each day dreaming only of completing Policenauts, and that it was a luxurious period spent purely as a creator; he added that later, once in his role as an executive and producer, his possibilities to create expanded, but he would never again be able to immerse himself for years in a single work as he did then, and that Policenauts can be considered the last work in which he was able to continue producing while looking only at the act of creating.

Kojima wrote that on Policenauts he did almost everything himself — game design, a massive amount of dialogue, the adventure scripts written in simplified language, the storyboards, hit detection, flag management and even the image and sound calls — and that if Metal Gear Solid, made by a team of 100 people, is a Hollywood commercial film, Policenauts is closer to an independent film: in every sense his own colour shows.

“Metal Gear was the first game that was released. There was this other game that I developed that never made it to the market--Lost World. The title was world but with war like a cross between war and world. It was a Mario-esque action game with a story.”

“I wanted to create a game [that played] like the movie, with the character running away· escaping without a fight and trying to avoid being seen by the enemy. I wanted to do that, but I couldn't get approval on that concept alone. I had to add more features.”

“When you get four enemies or even four bullets on the screen at once, the screen starts blinking and it just doesn't work. I tackled that problem by taking a different approach--hiding from enemies and not fighting them.”

“That is how I got the snake part. I guess the slithering of the snake is definitely not a solid motion. It's smoother, more liquid. I also wanted to create a paradoxical name.”