death

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Kojima 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.

Kojima described Satoshi Itoh as one of the fans who most deeply understood his works, to the point Itoh became known as a “Kojima fundamentalist.” After Itoh’s literary debut as Project Itoh they became friends and respected each other as creators with similar tastes; Itoh’s death in the spring of 2009 made Kojima feel he had lost both a recipient of his memes and a precious son.

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

“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.”

“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).”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“I 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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 want to die making something.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“I 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.”