Because everyone wants a piece of Hideo Kojima

With his farewell amidst a thousand controversies in 2015, many thought that Hideo Kojima’s career would end after the launch of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, yet another sequel on which he had admittedly worked reluctantly. Perhaps not even he imagined that, instead, his rebirth as an author recognized throughout the world, outside and inside the gilded cage of gaming, would start from there.

Today, the Japanese game designer and director (a label that is now too narrow for him) is the only one to have two PlayStation exclusives and an Xbox in the pipeline, thanks to the status he has built – as a highly sought-after independent – in almost 40 years of career. Which could make him, paradoxically for someone who produces exclusives, a character loved across the board.

Which it never was: with its modern productions, first in the difficult to digest field of stealth and then in that of an action adventure that overturns the open world paradigm, it has always been highly polarizing – ask for a “Bartolini simulator ” online and prepare yourself for myriads of different reactions – and poles apart with an ecumenical figure like the other golden Japanese, Shigeru Miyamoto.

From Disney+ to Spotify —

Yet, he is sought by everyone, and in all the fields in which he has worked over time. The documentary Hideo Kojima: Connecting Worlds on the production of Death Stranding is coming to Disney+ this year, he wrote the book “The Talent Gene and My Beloved Memes” in 2021, he made a podcast with Spotify in 2022 and, riding the he wave of his film recommendations on social media (at the end of each season, adoring fans await the verdicts in a tweet), he has recently even worked on Hideo Kojima’s Closet Picks with Criterion.

Guillermo del Toro, Nicolas Winding Refn, Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen are full of praise of all kinds after collaborating on Death Stranding (del Toro had tried, unsuccessfully, on the canceled Silent Hills, an experience that particularly traumatized him); he is working with a master of horror such as Jordan Peele, and his offices in Tokyo – where he keeps a wall for guests’ signatures – have become a place of pilgrimage for directors, actors, musicians, like when our Luca Guadagnino stopped by to visit him .

Net of this, Death Stranding did not have a devastating commercial impact: a difficult product to convey for lovers, opposed by the host of haters who do not forgive the messianism born around his figure. And this in the face of expenses (never clarified) that are presumed to have been impressive due to the technology and the Hollywood cast that he now claims to have in tow. The start on PS4 was quite slow in 2019 and, contrary to Sony’s habits of giving the most triumphant fanfare for every little success of PlayStation Studios, no data was disclosed. At the end of 2023, thanks also to giveaways and subscriptions, it reached 16 million players between PC and console, and in just a few days it was even brought to iPhone 15 and Mac.

But why does everyone want a piece of it? —

Because Hideo Kojima was the first to believe in the mix between cinema and video games, in a sometimes tacky way (the macho Metal Gear Solid is a child of his times and of a vision of the West filtered through the eyes of a Japanese), but in an era when it was still thought that gaming could not produce stories; and, now that technologies allow it, he is reaping the fruits of this vision in ways that others struggle to reach, both among his colleagues and in the adoring Hollywood that sees him as a charismatic passport to a new medium.

Because, with a rockstar exposure, having a boutique game signed by him and put on display regardless of sales can change the fate of the media battle that console manufacturers fight every day. Indeed, the separation from Konami has allowed the various Sony and Microsoft to pass as champions of authorship, the last bastion of independent creators against cruel multinationals (which they, obviously, are not).

He is one of the last big names, in a panorama such as that of gaming which – and is happening in many other fields of knowledge and entertainment – focuses on a depersonalized production to the detriment of the cult of authors.

A Hideo Kojima Game —

These factors give him virtually unlimited credit. In order to have a piece of it, Microsoft collects what according to rumor should have been an exclusive Google Stadia with a futuristic edge, a cloud-based game-experience in which the Japanese will act, amidst a thousand scepticisms, as an icebreaker. Sony grants him every whim: first of all Death Stranding brought to PC by another publisher after having financed it sight unseen (graphic engine lent by Guerrilla Games and Horizon included), secondly a return to the origins with a very distant “action espionage” which will even inconvenience the film divisions of the Japanese group. And all this so as not to lose the ius primae noctis, to say: Hideo Kojima’s games come out first on PlayStation.

In the middle, a trailer for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach that few could have afforded: electric guitars that become machine guns and then swords, talking puppets, bleached characters, hands that move on their own, George Miller. Visionary, dreamlike, delirious. Hideo Kojima. But that’s another story.