Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first game Hideo Kojima directed was Metal Gear, released on the 13th of July 1987 for the MSX2 home computer in Japan. He was handed the project by a senior associate at Konami and redesigned its gameplay around evasion rather than combat due to hardware limitations.
Kojima departed Konami in 2015 following the completion of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and the cancellation of Silent Hills. Konami removed his name from Metal Gear marketing materials, closed Kojima Productions internally, and reportedly barred him from attending The Game Awards 2015 where the game won Best Action Game.
P.T. was a free playable teaser released in August 2014, secretly made by Kojima Productions under the pseudonym 7780s Studio, serving as a demo for a new Silent Hill game called Silent Hills. Konami cancelled Silent Hills in April 2015 and removed P.T. from online storefronts; despite never reaching a full release, it is considered among the greatest horror games ever made.
Kojima received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the MTV Game Awards 2008 and a second Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2009 Game Developers Conference. In 2014, UNESCO's Bradford City of Film gave him the inaugural award for Cinematography in Videogames. In 2020, he was named a BAFTA Fellow, becoming the second Japanese person to receive that honour for video game work after Shigeru Miyamoto.
Kojima's parents held nightly film screenings with no content restrictions, exposing him to European films, horror, and Westerns from an early age. He began making short films in high school with a Super 8 camera, charging classmates fifty yen per screening. This immersion in cinema directly shaped his commitment to cinematic storytelling in games, which critics identified as a defining feature of his work from Snatcher onward.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was released on the 26th of June 2025. It is a sequel to Death Stranding, a game set in a post-apocalyptic world where isolated communities depend on porters to deliver supplies. Kojima rewrote the script twice during development, once to reflect the COVID-19 pandemic and again after test audiences responded too positively to an earlier version.