7 works to understand the mind-bending world of Hideo Kojima (original) (raw)

Hideo Kojima is arguably the most famous person making video games — a reputation earned not just because his games set the storytelling standard for the medium but also because their themes and story beats often feel uncannily prescient as time marches on.

That vision has led to collaborations with figures across Hollywood, including a horror project with Jordan Peele and an announced film adaptation of his 2019 apocalypse fable “Death Stranding” with A24. This month, he is expected to share more details about the game’s forthcoming sequel, “Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.”

While video games represent the work of many people, you can feel Kojima’s presence in each of his titles, especially after playing through his entire résumé. He is not egomaniacal. In the fifth Metal Gear Solid game, each level contains its own credit sequence highlighting individual members. But each of his games begins by flashing his imprint, “A Hideo Kojima Game,” because, as he tells it, he is involved in every level of the production, from writing the story, creating the concept and managingdata, all the way down to marketing and editing his own trailers.

Here are seven of his most important works and how each paints a portrait of the man many call “the first auteur of video games.”

‘Snatcher’ (1988)

Kojima’s first game, “Metal Gear,” was released in 1987, but his second project, “Snatcher,” was where his cinematic ambitions found their footing. Young artists borrow and steal all the time, and at 25, Kojima spun his own take on “Blade Runner” by creating a visual novel, a niche but highly influential game genre blending digital art, audio and text. It’s the genre that inspired him to create games in the first place: Kojima, who grew up devouring Agatha Christie novels, saw the storytelling potential of the medium when he played “The Portopia Serial Murder Case,” an early Nintendo title by Yuji Horii. With “Snatcher,” he would finally create his own mystery story.

Kojima’s flair for theatrics is immediately evident. Most visual novels even in modern years settle for character portraits to depict conversation. In “Snatcher,” Kojima creates a tangible sense of place. The nightclub sounds packed as a dancer twirls onstage amid strobe lights. Kojima’s writing also showed early habits that would continue in his later work, including an oddball sense of humor and an aggressive instinct to surprise and delight.

‘Metal Gear Solid’ (1998)

Describing the impact of the seminal PlayStation title is a bit like trying to explain why “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is so important to music. Before “MGS,” cinematic storytelling usually meant cutscenes that “cut” into gameplay to present story beats using either real video footage or “pre-rendered” animation. Kojima pushed the tech to present scenes with in-game 3D models, for a deeper level of narrative immersion. Suddenly, the toy soldier Snake on the TV was also talking, joking, even flirting with other fully realized and voiced characters. This is why Eurogamer calls “MGS” “the first modern video game.”

“I’ll call if I get lonely,” Snake says to his mission support team. It’s advice the player can take, dialing up other members of the cast just to chat or sometimes flirt or quote philosophy just to pass idle time. It’s a preview of the immediate engagement we get today from social media or even AI chatbots. This theme will run throughout several future works.

In part hoping to create a game that promotes nonviolent principles, Kojima made his first project, “Metal Gear,” a different kind of soldier game, where players avoid and run from conflict to infiltrate enemy bases. Its sequel, “Metal Gear Solid,” continued “Snatcher’s” attention to detail, making footprints in the snow raise enemy suspicion, turning ventilation shafts into passageways, and giving volume to breath in cold weather as stereo sound echoes across buildings so complex that Kojima resorted to storyboarding them with real-life Lego sets. “MGS” is the “Star Wars” of video games, forever changing the way blockbuster games are made.

‘Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty’ (2001)

If “MGS” was the modern game, “MGS2” immediately went postmodern. In a story layered with meta-commentary, Kojima demonstrated his ability to forecast humanity’s social crises.

It’s Kojima’s most infamous trick: He personally edited and released fake trailers of the game showcasing Snake as the returning protagonist, hiding the real main character, the novice soldier Raiden. These fake clips appeared in the game only during its “gotcha” moment, a scene revealing that this spy story is actually a cautionary tale on the internet’s capacity to spread damaging misinformation. “MGS2” laments a future of online echo chambers “where nobody is invalidated, but nobody is right,” three years before the first college student ever signed up for Facebook and decades before the TikTok algorithm broadcast self affirmations by the minute.

The game’s obsessive attention to detail also foreshadowed the blockbuster games market’s addiction to chasing excruciating levels of realism. Each bottle at a bar can break into individual glass pieces, and spilled ice cubes melt over time. Unlike the gameplay innovations in “MGS,” some of these graphical upgrades served only to wow audiences in electrifying trailers. Today, ballooning budgets strangle the AAA pipeline, and production cycles have gotten so long that big, cinematic games feel old when they’re released. By contrast, Metal Gear games felt like they came from the future.

‘Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner’ (2003)

Kojima’s involvement waxed and waned with his spottily received Zone of the Enders series, and its second entry is the only title on this list that he didn’t direct or write. On “The 2nd Runner,” Kojima pushed his team to make the game more advanced than its meager PlayStation 2 platform. This meant bigger battles with more robots. The team struggled with this, so Kojima made the simple suggestion to make the game’s art assets resemble a cartoon.

Kojima hired anime veterans to chisel the game’s look into something unlike anything seen even today. Smoke in “ZOE2” doesn’t billow or behave as it does on a more realistic title like “Call of Duty.” Instead, smoke effects from jets shoot out like tendrils, snaking across the screen. No mecha action game still looks quite like “ZOE2.”

‘P.T.’ (2014)

“P.T.” was originally marketed as a new horror game from an unknown indie studio. Players who finished the 90-minute experience got a special reward: The surprise reveal that “P.T.” stands for “playable teaser” and that it was for a new game in the horror series Silent Hill under the co-direction of Kojima, Guillermo del Toro and horror artist Junji Ito. Kojima had tricked the world again by scaring it witless. “Silent Hills” was never to be, as Kojima and Konami parted ways in one of gaming’s most infamous exits.But “P.T.” also inspired Kojima’s upcoming project with director Jordan Peele, a horror game called “OD.”

The impact of “P.T.” is felt everywhere in the horror genre today. It turned a quaint, L-shaped hallway into a drip-feeding, looping existential nightmare. Players had no ability to fight, teaching other horror developers that these stories didn’t need combat to feel scary. Kojima’s exit from the company led this game to be delisted and removed from digital storefronts. Today, PlayStation 4 consoles with “P.T.” still downloaded sell for more money. The real horror story is that this game and “Snatcher” aren’t available on modern platforms. Even with a game creator as popular and celebrated as Kojima, the games industry fails to preserve its own legacy.

‘Death Stranding’ (2019)

Months before a pandemic forced people indoors and elevated delivery service workers to the forefront of society, Kojima created and published a game about exactly that. “Death Stranding” is his first title as an independent creator, a monument to all his indulgences now that he’s been freed of corporate oversight.

His obsession with nonviolent player expression goes to the extreme. In “Death Stranding’s” cryptic, supernaturally plagued America, killing people is not only discouraged, it also becomes a massive inconvenience for you and for other people playing the game. If someone dies, you have to drag their corpse all the way to a crematorium tucked away in the mountains. If not burned, corpses eventually trigger massive destruction that could leave a crater not just in your world but in other players’ worlds, too.

“Death Stranding” is a game built with the opposite goal of social media platforms. While places such as Facebook and X reward “engagement” for its own sake, Kojima imagines a game world where players are forced and incentivized to help one another. It provides no space for confrontation with other humans, only opportunities to create bridges, build roads and carry packages for other people. After the pandemic panic, Kojima joked that “Death Stranding” predicted the future. It was really a preemptive defense against a world that would only further tear itself apart.

‘The Creative Gene’ (2021)

One of the better windows into Kojima’s creative life isn’t a game at all but a collection of essays that may initially disappoint anyone seeking direct, citable insight into Kojima’s game-development process. Game talk is barely here. Instead, Kojima reflects on books, albums, films and other pieces of art he has consumed over the years.

Anyone who plays Kojima’s games will eventually pick up on his love of music — David Bowie, Starsailor, Low Roar — and his broad tastes in books, film and TV. In his games, there’s usually a recurring pop culture nerd archetype who’s always making film or music references and recommendations to the player. Here, Kojima inhabits this role.

“The Creative Gene” is practically an autobiography. He mentions here as he has in the past (including in his Disney Plus documentary) that he grew up a “latchkey kid.” As a child whose father died young, he would return home alone and be the first to turn on the lights, quelling his isolation with books and TV. To understand Kojima is to know he grew out of a lonely life, that the yearning for connection in his games is earnest, even as he does it through media.

He recalls in one essay being trapped in an elevator with 12 other people. As an hour passed and people panicked — his assistant feared they would run out of oxygen — Kojima’s mind wandered instead to the French New Wave film “Elevator to the Gallows.” He is always thinking about art and how it mirrors life.

Kojima doesn’t just make games; he consumes art and transmutes its ideas, or memes, into his games. His game-development process is unlocked once you understand his work is the result of intense personal scrutiny and reflection of other artists.