video games

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Even though we're behind schedule, everyone at KCE Japan has been obsessed with Mario Kart 64. On break everyone rushes over to snatch up a controller, and the people waiting grab a Sega Saturn 3D control pad and do "image training", mimicking the movements while they watch and wait their turn.”

“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've probably looked at 10,000 candidates myself at this point, and I've never seen anyone who I immediately wanted to give an S until Shinkawa. He's the only one, and it was an instant hanamaru (the Japanese equivalent of a "gold star").”

“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.”

“We went to go buy dry ice but they didn't have any, so with no other options, even though I don't smoke I lit some cigarettes and blew smoke everywhere. (laughs)”

“These games had their own worlds and stories. I felt a certain authorial quality in them.”

“So I went around to different game companies, and partly because I was living in Hyogo prefecture at the time, but I thought I'd check out Konami.”

“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.”

“I've heard the American military is using video games as training tools now too, making their soldiers play DOOM. Apparently people are more willing to pull a trigger on the battlefield if they've played these games. Of course, this leads to the impression that "games are training for murderers!"”

“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.”

“Metal Gear Solid sells more in Europe and America than Japan. I was unapologetic about making something Japanese in taste, but amazingly it was received with more passion and enthusiasm by people overseas.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“More than imitating movies directly, I would say it's that I try to recreate scenes in a cinematic way.”

“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."”

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.

“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)”

“There was a period, before my Father died, where I thought I'd become an artist, but my Father died very suddenly when I was 13. My family was full of artists, you see, and they hadn't been able to make a living off of it.”

“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.”

“If I direct the same team, it will only lead to the same game being made.”

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

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

Taxi Driver did not teach Kojima to defeat his loneliness but to live with it, because it showed him that someone else could feel the same way. Decades later he believed that that emotional sickness had vanished around the birth of his first child and when he began making video games: upon realizing his works connected him with faceless, nameless players around the world, the loneliness fell away definitively.

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.

For Blade Runner’s 25th anniversary, Kojima made a personal festival: he bought the five‑DVD set, a three‑CD anniversary soundtrack, a making‑of book, and reread the novel. Although immersed in Metal Gear Solid 4, he made time to see the Final Cut; he asked for one ticket for “BlaRun” and the ticket seller did not understand the nickname. After an unusually silent exit from the screening, he found other viewers gathered in the lobby before the display photos, talking enthusiastically; sharing the film in a theater with strangers who loved it was, for him, the true Final Cut.

“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.”

“But I have to say, my feeling hasn't changed; I would like to pass on the Metal Gear series to younger staff members, and then go on to produce the title, and not be so attached to it.”

“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.”

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.

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.

“There were a lot of surprises - the way the Western developers do things are so different! What I'm thinking now is, OK, we need to be a global studio.”

“I think in the near future, it will be increasingly like the Hollywood model - there might be a person who will fund, and a person who is the creator.”

“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.”

“Not really! Recently, Kojima Productions was involved in the creation of a foreign currency trading game - so I guess that kind of counts!”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sure, there is definitely pressure. We don't belong wholly to Konami, so that pressure might be lighter, but since Kojima Productions is a part of Konami and Konami does the business side of things, yeah, I feel pressure there, that there's a need for it to be a successful, ongoing series.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I first met Ishii this year, but I knew about him a long time previous. I get told by people that there are only three guys in Japan who like adventures: me, Ishii and Shu Takumi.”

“We're both pretty close to each other in that the movie business has been near and dear to our hearts. The only difference is that he's been able to keep making adventures this whole time.”

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

During the 2010 world tour for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Kojima was trapped with twelve other people (thirteen total) in a freight elevator at Uniqlo Soho in New York City. They managed to open the elevator doors with their bare hands and found only the metal wall of the shaft because the car had stopped between floors; as people began pounding on the cabin the smell of panic spread and there was fear of running out of oxygen, and Kojima found himself thinking of elevator movies. An hour later a rescue team evacuated them by ladder through the top of the elevator car, and they escaped without injury.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

“I felt great potential in the medium”

“plays with Legos all day”

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.

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.

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 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.

“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.”

“Without that encounter I probably wouldn't have pursued a proper sequel, and there might never have been a Metal Gear Solid.”

“Every week they paid for us to visit a forest in the mountains nearby. We would dress up in military uniform and play games there. It was a good time.”

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.

“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.”

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

“In the past I've mentioned Silent Hill in interviews, and as a result of that the president of Konami rung me up and said he'd like me to make the next Silent Hill.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

“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'll do whatever the (expletive) he wants”

At The Game Awards in December 2016, Kojima presented the second Death Stranding trailer, revealing Mads Mikkelsen and Guillermo del Toro as appearing in the game.

“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.”

“I’m back”

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.

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 stated that creating the new company was more difficult than developing Death Stranding: upon becoming independent he had to recover credibility, financing, people and a place to work. Fans of his earlier games helped him in unforeseen ways, and he was able to deal directly with Hollywood actors who appreciated Metal Gear and wanted to participate out of mutual affinity.

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.

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.

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

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

“I allowed myself to create this temporary genre by the name 'social strand', because it's more fair to the game”

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

“I first met Hideo when Guillermo del Toro called me and said, 'Hey, there's a guy who's going to call you and wants to do a video game with you. Just say yes.'”

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

“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.”

“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!”

“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”

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

“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".”

“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.

VIZ's biographical note places Kojima's birth in Tokyo in 1963, his directorial debut with Metal Gear in 1987, the establishment of his independent studio Kojima Productions at the end of 2015, and the release of Death Stranding in 2019.

“I received the 72nd Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts from the Agency of Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan. Thank you very much. I have been creating games for 36 years.”

“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.”

“I came to Tokyo in 1996, not too long after going through the Kobe earthquake. At that time, I was making a game called Policenauts, and when we were working on the Sega Saturn version, Mr. Mamoru Oshii and I met and had our first conversation.”

“At that time, actually, we had a plan for Mr. Oshii to come to my studio and get a 3D scan done of him so he could appear in Death Stranding. But he had a broken bone at that time, so I didn't get to see him.”

“I like films, but decided to make games, and that's why I think my work is a bit unique.”

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

“They can't break free, they can't quit, they can't lose. It felt like that when Metal Gear started gaining fans and I started getting fan letters.”

“They won't tell me the budget and release dates get announced out of the blue. Or they would suddenly spill the contents of a project during promos. Once they totally gave away spoilers in a magazine interview.”

“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 can't really recommend it either. Mr. Oshii says that you should play offline and just watch the story on YouTube.”

“She's not motivated by money. She doesn't do anything that she doesn't want to do. If that wasn't the case, she wouldn't have worked on my project.”

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

“We follow each other on Twitter, and he seemed to have played my game too. He said, hope you enjoy my movie. So, if you can come on the show as a guest, that would be great.”

“It was my first time meeting him, but I feel like we've known each other since childhood. I think we are going to be good friends.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It'll be like RRR and H for Hideo, so RRR HHH or RH RH RH, we should call it RH Games.”

“And in Mr. Rajamouli's films, the main characters always take their clothes off. Same with my games.”

“I've never once said anything to Phil about wanting to create a Death Stranding sequel. I don't know who pulled this kind of information from where.”

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

“Well, this isn't fake news, but every single day from all over the world, I get messages saying, hey, make a new Metal Gear, or PT, or Boktai, or Zone of the Enders. I take this as a positive thing, but also, as adults, everyone should know that this isn't going to happen, right?”

“At this stage, nothing costs any money and since it can be done mentally, it's the most fun part for me.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's a song that has been used in movies and I actually thought about using it for the ending of Death Stranding. The lyrics and the vibe would have fit really well, so I had that song in mind when I made the ending.”

“The only things I had were four staff members, my computer, and my iPhone.”

“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.”

“I built up the world of Death Stranding in parallel with Ryan's music, and I talked to him about how I wanted to use his music in the game too, not just the teaser.”

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

“So people told me to go with Keanu, but I was always for Mads. I made that character for Mads.”

“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.”

“There needs to be trust between myself and the actors in order to see it through, because it can get pretty tough.”

“And in order to appeal to those who didn't play the first one, I've made the game nostalgic, but also new.”

“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.”

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

“Movies and music existed separately, but he made them into one entity. That's why I want to emulate him and combine film and video games into one.”

“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.”

“So I looked for the CD, bought it, and realised I wanted to put it into the game. It was fate that we reunited.”

“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.”

“Yes, he visited and we got to do the long-awaited 3D scan of him. […] He could be someone just walking around and you run into him if you're playing offline. He won't be part of the story.”

“I did scan him. […] Yeah, you'll probably show up getting a shoulder ride. If you see someone on a shoulder, you'll know it's him. Maybe I'll be the one carrying him in the CG.”

“Yeah, I scanned myself the last time around. Not this time though. In the last game, I was the one that came out of the tar.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“I make the games as I film the cutscenes, and the staff and I give each other feedback to make sure we keep consistency throughout the game.”

“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.”

“Putting Elle in a video game is a big responsibility on my part, so I wanted to make something that will live up to her expectations.”

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

“In MGS5, Snake isn't really Snake, and Ocelot becomes kind of like the storyteller. And this was really difficult and playing the part of Ocelot was risky, but Troy did an amazing job, so I'm really grateful.”

“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.”

“I also think that, ultimately, this was the first step in proclaiming that games are just like movies, and that they are all entertainment.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“We used like 500 or 600 eggs, but we couldn't throw them out, so the staff was going to eat them.”

“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.”

“In Spain, there was a huge line to buy the game because it was the first time that a Spanish audio game was released in the country of Spain.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“In my previous company, I was free to do what I wanted, but it wasn't my own brand. ... The only way is to produce it yourself.”

“And Sony, as far as I know, basically said, "We're going to bet on you, Hideo Kojima, as a creator." We don't even need to know what the game is. We're just in.”

“When I first explained this to my staff, I got a largely negative response. They said, "But no one does that..."”

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

“The player is the only one making the connections, so the sense of loneliness is torturous at the start.”

“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.”

“My mother was the only one who didn't object for some reason. "If you want to pursue it, that's fine."”

“But if you say, "It's visually different from anything that exists", they can't visualize it.”

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

“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.”

“They were the kind of people that I wanted to work with. ... I wanted to do something with them that probed slightly deeper.”

“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.”

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

“We've taken a first step, a giant leap in the entertainment industry.”

“I was pleased to receive messages from people who felt the game saved them because the game indirectly connected them to others. That was my motivation for creating things in the first place.”

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

“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”

“so this collaboration will be really awesome”

“I can say that from the first moment I played Metal Gear Solid 2, I knew I was experiencing the work of an artist whose craft just hits different.”

“Every time I say something about that game [Death Stranding] on the internet or a talk show or whatever and Hideo hasn't said it first, he calls and he yells at me. So I'm not saying anything. He's yelled at me several times.”

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

Around March 2025, around his appearance at SXSW, Kojima announced that Death Stranding had surpassed 20 million players across all platforms; he said that people still playing it makes him the happiest.

For Death Stranding 2, Kojima had to turn down around half of the cameo requests from famous people: scanning each person in the studio took about fifteen minutes, and the team ran out of space on the project.

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.

“People think I just want to be famous, right? But no—I want to raise the bar for gaming, and game creators.”

“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."”

“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 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,”

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 saw a religious painting and from there, I pictured "Death Stranding." ... My interpretations can be way off, but they inspire me.”

“The game industry took a toll on my eyes. I started wearing glasses when I was about 30.”

“This is the score to "Death Stranding 2" by Woodkid on vinyl. The "Jaws" score by John Williams. ... A single by Koji Tamaki. The Japanese edition of the Last Dinner Party's new album. ... Spandau Ballet is a band from my youth. A CD box set.”

“Watched 'Return to Silent Hill' on Amazon Prime”

“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.”

Kojima was playing Mr. Horii’s remake of the adventure game “The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case The Okhotsk Disappearance” and enjoying the nostalgic game. Time management was important to him, so he was shifting some of the time he spent on movies and reading to games.

In mid-June 2026, PlayStation Studios notified Kojima and KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS that it would cancel PHYSINT. The project was important both to Kojima and to his studio. After three months of searching for a new partner, Kojima and his team found a shared vision with XBOX and decided to work together again. Development of PHYSINT continues.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

In a statement supplied to IGN after the interview, Kojima Productions urged scepticism toward unofficial explanations for Physint’s change of partner. The studio said it was healthy and profitable, that development was continuing with Xbox and that its relationship with PlayStation remained strong.

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.

“People are still playing it. I get the numbers every day. Very few players drop off. The people who love it keep playing.”

“I want to keep quiet and release it. That's unusual for me, isn't it?”

“Before someone calls "Action!" she seems like an ordinary person. Then the camera rolls, and she transforms. She'll do anything. It's remarkable.”

“And we're making two animated projects. […] A film and a series. They're progressing well, too.”

“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.”

“I pitched him the game, and he agreed to do it.”

“He keeps asking me for the script. […] I have the plot ready. But he wants to know the lines and how his character speaks. […] He asks me to write it but I'm like, "Hold on!"”

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

“I took that photo.”

“We've finally started. We've been shooting since June and will continue through the end of the year.”

“I asked who would be good for the lead. He said, "Sophia Lillis, obviously!"”

“She looked after Udo throughout the three-day scan.”

“From the first “DEATH STRANDING”... […] we have work we made before we even had an engine. […] There were only five or six of us.”

“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.”

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 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.

Besides Metal Gear, at Konami Kojima produced or supervised other games: he was producer of Zone of the Enders (2001) and of Boktai (2003), executive producer of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (2010) and supervising director of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (2013).

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.

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 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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”