technology

“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?”

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

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.

“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.”

“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.”

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.

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

“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.”

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

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

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

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.

“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.”

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Subscribe? But I like buying CDs.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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.

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

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

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

“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.”