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Hideo Kojima on ‘Death Stranding’ and the art of cinematic video games (FT Magazine)
As pre-launch excitement for his new game mounts, the legendary developer talks to the FT in Tokyo
By Leo Lewis
For over an hour now, Hideo Kojima has been valiantly trying to stick to his own rules. But the craftsman’s pride is clearly under strain. The legendary gamesmaker has agreed to an FT interview on the understanding it will not delve too deeply into Death Stranding – a title trading heavily on pre-release mystique, that ranks, for many reasons, among the most anticipated video games of all time. But, finally, Kojima’s resolve seems to break.
“Death Stranding… even now, I don’t understand the game,” he pretends to confide, still giving nothing away. “Its world view, gameplay, they are all new. My mission is to create a genre that does not currently exist, and which takes everyone by surprise. There is, naturally, a risk in that…”
It is purest Kojima. Purest showmanship. This moment – and the remaining weeks before Death Stranding’s release in November – are the culmination of one of the great dramas to grip the $135bn global games industry: Kojima’s abrupt departure from the Japanese games company Konami in 2015 and subsequent establishment of his own studio.
The game, a sci-fi adventure whose details have been deliberately shrouded in intrigue, emerges from a still-unresolved four-year mystery surrounding the precise reasons he left, strict non-disclosure on both sides and breathless speculation among fans over what direction Kojima would take once independent.
At the centre of all that is a gently spoken creator of bestsellers such as the Metal Gear franchise. Kojima enjoys megastar status among a worldwide fan base and, aged 56, personifies geeky mischief. The Death Stranding launch is Kojima’s first as CEO of his own company. It is a landmark for the industry and, visibly, a nerve-jangler for him. The technology, he says, has finally advanced far enough for him to create what he always imagined games would be capable of delivering.
Judging by the trailers, Death Stranding, which “stars” actors Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen and Guillermo del Toro (they voice spookily accurate simulacra on screen), comes closer than anything before to the merging of games and film, and the narrative and visual rhythms of both. That synthesis, Kojima says, has been a defining ambition since when, as a latchkey child in Kansai, he spent long, unsupervised hours absorbing all available modes of storytelling.
“In my childhood, there were no good teachers or adults around me. I was disappointed in them. But I discovered amazing tales by reading novels or watching movies: they moved me, and I moved forward. The stories helped me when I was lost in life,” he says, recalling what it was like to be among one of the last waves of Japanese children to enter their teens without video games. By the time Space Invaders first appeared in 1978, Kojima was already in junior high school.
“But at that point, I began to realise the possibilities that came with making things. And it’s not that I’m only creating the things that I want to make. The reason why I want to make things is that, through my past experiences, I know I can influence and help others who I haven’t even met.”
His spectacular success in doing so means he has millions of admirers around the world, desperate to see what their hero will come up with now that he is free of Konami. They constantly bombard him with reminders of how close the Death Stranding launch is, using Twitter to count down to the game’s release. “After 30 years preparing for launches, I can sleep OK at this stage of the countdown…” he says, somewhat uncertainly. “I just don’t dream.”
Comparisons are inevitably made between Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto, the creative brain behind much of Nintendo’s best-known output. There are fascinating similarities and, to many, the pair represent the yin-yang diarchy of Japanese gamesmaking. While Miyamoto’s genius lies in the soft, family-friendly contours of Mario, Donkey Kong, Pikmin and the fantasy worlds they inhabit, Kojima has focused on the stubble-chinned violence of mercenaries, spies and assassins, his games giving their exploits a cinematic edge.
As Kojima talks, he keeps returning to the confluence of film and games. He remarks in particular on the effect that he believes games – after almost 40 years in the mainstream – have had on a new generation of film-makers. As the great proponent of cinematic games, Kojima says he constantly receives requests to direct movies but always turns them down.
“The thing that surprises me is that all the visual creators in their thirties…grew up as gamers,” he says. “People who first came into contact with stories through games, or found out about the profession through games, are now making films. I find that fascinating because I am the opposite: I came to films first but now I make games.”
The thought is interrupted by an odd interlude. We are speaking in the side room of Casita, a swish and fairly busy Italian bistro in Aoyama – a district of Tokyo usually so replete with celebrities that they spark minimal fuss. Kojima’s fame, however, exceeds normal limits and adoring staff have worked out who their guest is. He stops mid-sentence and points up towards the speakers, delighted.
The soft jazz that had been playing discreetly across the restaurant’s dark, hardwood interior has suddenly been replaced with the theme music from some of Kojima’s hit games. Harry Gregson-Williams’ music is sublime in its context but Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is not, Kojima acknowledges, terribly restauranty.
He pauses, adjusting a pair of large, blue-framed glasses of his own design, and returns to the way in which games have not only influenced films, but have also changed the way in which people watch them. “There are stories being told [in cinema] that my generation may find surprising but which the gamer generation doesn’t find weird at all,” he says.
He then corrects what he sees as a common misconception. In its most breathless form, Kojima-worship slips into equating video games with art. But while Kojima agrees that he was sucked into games for their potential as a creative medium, he takes a more pragmatic view than some of his fans would like. He calls what he does a service industry – in some sense an art, but more akin to what sushi masters do. Their dishes may be beautiful, but they always have nourishment as the principal goal.
“If you take something that looks like a banana and give it the title ‘apple’, that works as art. But it doesn’t apply to games. We are making things that are interactive. A banana has to be edible after you peel the skin. Cars have to be drivable. For games to be interactive and to deliver the enjoyment, there has to be a reality where there are lots of people backstage making it all happen. That is us – a kind of art-driven service industry.”
The dominant theme of Kojima’s conversation is his theory that games are in some ways the ultimate expression of craftsmanship. For most of his career, Kojima was synonymous with Konami, the Japanese company that started life in the late 1960s repairing broken jukeboxes, but rode the growth first of arcades and later consoles to become one of the country’s biggest games companies.
Kojima operated within the sometimes constrictive walls of that alma mater, but did so with such verve, and to such acclaim, that he became one of the first producers whose name appeared on the packaging above his games’ titles, like a Spielberg-calibre film director.
His output was substantial and varied. As his fame grew, his production unit operated more as a subsidiary of Konami, with ever greater control of budgets and artistic direction. This gave him broad scope to push his own visions for games, but his unit was still subject to the need to churn out a steady flow of product.
Kojima hints at some of the challenges he encountered in trying to convince the hierarchy of a Japanese company that the convergence of games and film was achievable, but admits his early requests to put Hollywood actors into games as playable characters were unrealistic and rejected.
His most defining and successful creation was the Metal Gear series of intricately plotted action thrillers – a run of games so commercially important to Konami that it commanded its own separate line in the company’s financial statements.
But by 2015, games and Konami were changing. Mobile games hit profits in the traditional console industry from about 2012, and Konami suffered a sharp decline. Industry analysts speculated that Kojima’s way of doing things – fastidious and epic – no longer fitted the Konami template.
His sudden departure, which Konami insists was amicable, played out in the press as a grand mystery. There was no shortage of theories about its cause. Many of them focused on the idea that Konami’s management may have found it hard to cope with an influence as outsized as Kojima’s.
When it briefly looked as if Kojima’s own fledgling studio might find life hard outside Konami, Sony was quick to sweep in to offer partnership and support. Death Stranding is, in large part, the result of that manoeuvre.
But what has emerged from this turmoil will, he says, give him full control over the process that first brought him to games – the practice referred to by the Japanese word monozukuri. This is the “thingmaking” or craftsmanship which, for many of the country’s most famous companies, is used to define their reason for existing.
“Now I have my own studio, but what I want to do is the same as before. I want to do monozukuri. Game designing is a holistic thing for me. Working with all the designs, stories, concepts, graphics and sound. That is the meaning of game designing,” he says, adding that the role of director is the only one that combines all of these in one job. The years before he was given that responsibility were frustrating, he says. “When I first joined the company after graduating from college, it was so difficult to convince others what I really wanted to make.”
He grasps for an illustration of how the same word that the Japanese apply with equal awe to a perfect morsel of sushi or to a tiny engine component can – and should – be applied to games. He points again to the restaurant speakers, still playing music from his games, as an example of just how responsive the soundtrack must be.
“We might have it more melodic when a character looks in this direction, and then have that fade when they take some particular action. It’s like the cello coming in, or the drums adding accent to movement when Tom and Jerry are wrecking things in one of their cartoons,” he says.
Steady improvements in technology have allowed him to inch closer to his childhood vision of monozukuri. When he entered the industry in 1986, he says, game graphics were nothing special, the sounds were primitive and the available palette of colours small.
“If you fired across the screen in Metal Gear, your bullets would start to vanish because of the limited number of sprites [graphic display elements]. Looking back, [Konami] at that time wasn’t the right place for someone like me who wanted to make films, but I sensed that games had enormous potential,” he says.
In fact, he elaborates, he was certain that they did. The decisive factor was the surging global success of the Nintendo Entertainment System console, which brought games from the arcade into the home. Just as comedians go misty-eyed at the thought of heyday routines by Lenny Bruce or Joan Rivers, gamesmakers rhapsodise about Nintendo’s Super Mario – the supreme example of immersing the player in narrative using the most basic gaming tools.
“It was 2D, and all Mario could do was run or jump,” Kojima recalls. “You just travelled from left to right. The goal was on your right and you just jumped over anything that blocked your way. The shocking thing, though, was that you could play it endlessly, just jumping and running. Left to right. There was no depth, just metal drums here and there, but you really felt as if you were adventuring. Even with those graphics and [that] sound, I was convinced that this was going to be an incredible medium.”
Others were sceptical. When he told friends that he wanted to work for a games company, they strongly opposed the idea. “Normal people didn’t go to work at games companies back then,” Kojima says. “I thought I was taking a risk, but the technology evolved faster than I expected.”
That draws his thoughts back to Death Stranding, and his attempts not to show his nerves about the release. The restaurant staff do not make it easy. One appears with a cappuccino whose foam has been intricately decorated with the Death Stranding logo. Kojima joyously snaps it from a dozen angles for his Instagram before finally lifting the cup to his lips. There is a tiny note on the saucer, left there by one of his fans in the kitchen: “91 days to go!” it reads.
Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo correspondent. “Death Stranding” will be released on November 8.
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