failure

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

“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.”

“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.”

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 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.

“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.”

“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.”

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

Kojima 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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

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

“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.”

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

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.

“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.'”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“I really don't like saying this, but it really wasn't up to my standards. The care that I put in the original wasn't there.”

“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.”