Hideo Kojima

History

On December 3, 2015, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain won Best Action/Adventure Game at The Game Awards in Los Angeles, and Kiefer Sutherland, the voice of Big Boss, came up to accept it for Hideo Kojima. The host, Geoff Keighley, told the audience why Kojima was not there: “Mr. Kojima had every intention of being here, but unfortunately he was informed by a lawyer representing Konami that he would not be allowed to travel to tonight’s award ceremony to accept any awards.” Kojima had worked at Konami since 1986. Thirteen days later, on December 16, he announced Kojima Productions as an independent studio, partnered with Sony Computer Entertainment.

At Konami he was put on games for the MSX2 home computer. Its screen flickered when too many moving figures were on it at once, so only a few enemies could be on screen together. At GDC in 2009 he said: “So, Metal Gear was born from hardware limitations.” In a 1999 interview with the Japanese magazine Nice Games, he told how the project reached him. Konami wanted a war game. Veteran developers had spent two years on one, building it and scrapping it, and then it was handed to the new planner: Kojima. He says: “What I was fixated on making, in the scope of a ‘war’ game, was an escape game. You know that old movie, The Great Escape?” The senior developers answered: “There’s no games like that.” He was, he says, “ready to quit Konami altogether.” Then an older employee called everyone in the office to a presentation about the game, and attitudes began to change. The doubters were won over by a working build in which an exclamation mark popped up when an enemy was surprised. He says: “They all changed their tune then: ‘This is gonna work!’”

He was fifty-two when he went independent. In February 2024, on HideoTube, his studio’s YouTube show, he said: “I still wanted to do something new in my life. And if I’m going to do something, it’s got to be something no one else is doing. Otherwise, there’s no point. If I can pave the way by doing something... similar to Death Stranding, if the younger generation follows the path I’ve made, maybe it will be easier, in a sense. Like, finding the water I left behind in the mountains.”

At the end of January 2016 he visited game studios in the United States and Europe to see their technology and tools. On the second episode of HideoTube that March, he named what to focus on when making a game: “The people on the team, the technology and finally the atmosphere.” Of his own studio, then two months old, he said: “We still don’t have the staff, no building, just started the basic plan.”

Death Stranding is a game about a courier, Sam, played by Norman Reedus, carrying cargo on foot across a broken America. Mads Mikkelsen joined the cast. In February 2017, more than two years before the game came out on November 8, 2019, Kojima talked on HideoTube about filming with Mikkelsen: “Mads did some things that were different from what I instructed. And I was thinking of fixing them, but then I checked through the frame and they look really good, so they went through.”

In February 2024, while he was making Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (released June 26, 2025), he said: “Before the pandemic, I actually had the whole plot for DS2 prepared. But, after experiencing the pandemic, what I wrote before the pandemic no longer worked.” He rewrote it from scratch. The first game had been about connecting everyone. The theme of the second, he said, was “Should we have connected?”

In the same February 2024 video, he explained his next game, Physint, an action-espionage game announced with Sony in January 2024. For eight years, he said, people around the world had asked him every day on social media for another Metal Gear. He says: “Then, I fell ill in 2020. It was also during the pandemic, so I was sick and isolated during all of it. I even had surgery.” He wrote a will. “And in that moment, I realized that people die.” After that, he decided to shift his priorities a little, for the people who had been asking.

Hollywood kept offering him films, and he kept turning them down: “I can’t leave for 1 or 2 years to go make a movie. The company would collapse.” He talked it over with Guillermo del Toro, who told him: “Hideo, what you’re making is already a movie. Keep going as you are.” Kojima says: “His words saved me.”