Hideo Kojima
Hideo Kojima was born in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo on the 24th of August 1963. His father Kingo worked as a pharmacist and traveled frequently for business. He named his son Hideo because it was the most common name among the doctors he met during his travels. The family moved to Osaka when Kojima was four years old. This abrupt change of environment led him to spend much of his time indoors watching television or making figurines. His parents were passionate about cinema especially European films horror and Wild West movies. They began a nightly tradition of watching a film with their children who were not allowed to go to bed until the film had finished. His parents did not limit the type of films the children were allowed to see regardless of content. Kojima took an interest in filmmaking when a friend brought a Super 8 camera to high school. They began making films together charging other children ¥50 to see them. He tricked his parents into funding a trip to an island off the coast of Japan without telling them that he was going there because he wanted to use it as a filming location. However he instead spent his time there swimming and changed the film's plot to be about zombies on the final day as this idea would be quicker to shoot. He did not show the film to his parents.
Kojima joined video game publisher Konami's MSX home computer division in 1986. He applied to Konami because it was the only game developer listed on the Japanese stock exchange. The first game he worked on was Penguin Adventure which significantly expanded upon the gameplay of Antarctic Adventure. It added more action game elements a greater variety of levels role-playing elements such as upgrading equipment and multiple endings. In 2019 Polygon Julia Lee wrote that for a game made over 30 years ago Penguin Adventure had some in-depth features. After Penguin Adventure Kojima started to design a game called Lost World but the game was canceled when it was found to be too complex to run on the MSX. Kojima was asked to take over a project Metal Gear from a senior associate who had been stuck on it. Hardware limitations hindered the development of the game's combat. Kojima altered the gameplay to focus on a prisoner escaping instead of fighting inspired by The Great Escape. You could not have more than four bullets with MSX and that meant you could only have two to three enemies. You cannot make a combat qame with that. So I came up with a game like The Great Escape where the prisoner had to escape. It was an idea born from adverse situations. It was released on the 13th of July 1987 for the MSX2 home computer in Japan and in September that year for Europe.
His next project was the graphic adventure game Snatcher released for the NEC PC-8801 and MSX2 computer platforms in Japan on the 26th of November 1988. Kojima wrote and directed the game. He planned for the game to have six chapters but was instructed to trim it down to two. The team wanted to create a third chapter but were already over the allowed development schedule so were forced to end the game on a cliffhanger. The cyberpunk-influenced game has a semi-open world design. Kojima and character designer Tomiharu Kinoshita treated the project like making a film or anime rather than a game. Former Konami artist Satoshi Yoshoioka designed many of Snatcher characters said he was persistently guided by Kojima to make the game as cinematic as possible which later critics have cited as a staple of his work. Adrian Chen of The New York Times wrote that one of his innovations was the way he applied cinematic storytelling to console video games. Snatcher draws heavily from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and includes enough references that the game strays near copyright infringement. A port for the Sega CD was made without Kojima but the amount of text and length of the script made localisation expensive and time-consuming taking three months. Snatcher was modestly successful in Japan but the western port was a commercial failure selling only a few thousand units.
On the 16th of December 2015 Kojima announced that Kojima Productions would be as an independent studio partnered with Sony Computer Entertainment and that his first game would be exclusive to PlayStation 4. At E3 2016 Kojima personally announced the game's title as Death Stranding in a trailer. The trailer featured Norman Reedus who was set to play the protagonist in Kojima's previous work the canceled Silent Hills. Trailers leading up to release also revealed the castings of actors Mads Mikkelsen Léa Seydoux Margaret Qualley Troy Baker Tommie Earl Jenkins and Lindsay Wagner for the game as well as special appearances from film directors Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn. Death Stranding was released on the 8th of November 2019. It received generally positive reviews and was a commercial success. It also won a number of awards including Best Game Direction and Best Score/Music at The Game Awards 2019 and Outstanding Achievement in Audio Design and Outstanding Technical Achievement at the 23rd Annual D.I.C.E. Awards. In November 2019 talking to BBC Newsbeat as part of a documentary about Death Stranding Kojima said In the future Kojima Productions will start making films.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was released on the 13th of November 2001. While the game received universal acclaim upon release for its gameplay and attention to detail the plot was a divisive topic among critics with some calling it absurd and stupid. Reinterpretations of the game's plot began to surface in the 2010s with some calling it misunderstood in its time eerily prescient and necessary for the political climate to come for predicting some of the cultural issues of the 2010s with striking accuracy and similar concepts. GamesRadar+ has cited the prescience of the game in relation to the Facebook, Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. The concept of Selection for Societal Sanity presented in the game was one of the bases for the paper Filtration Failure: On Selection for Societal Sanity written by Adrian Mróz and published in the academic journal . In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain released on the 1st of September 2015 the Wolbachia bacteria is used to halt the reproduction of the fictional vocal cord parasites. At the time large-scale uses of Wolbachia to control insect-transmitted diseases like malaria and dengue only existed in simulated computational models and field-test releases in Australia. Deployment of Wolbachia was proposed the next year at the peak of the Zika epidemic in the Americas.
Newsweek named Kojima as one of the top ten people of 2002. In 2008 Next-Gen placed him seventh in their list of Hot 100 Developers 2008. In 2009 IGN placed him sixth in their list of top game creators of all time. At the 2008 MTV Game Awards Kojima was given the award show's first Lifetime Achievement Award for a game designer and was also honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2009 Game Developers Conference. In 2014 UNESCO's Bradford City of Film gave Kojima the inaugural award for Cinematography in Videogames for his astounding directing storytelling and cinematography in video games. At the 2014 National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers NAVGTR awards Kojima was credited for Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes nomination for the category Game Franchise Adventure. In December 2015 Kojima was invited to accept an award from The Game Awards 2015 for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain but was prevented from attending by Konami. In February 2016 he received the AIAS Hall of Fame Award at the 19th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards.
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Common questions
When and where was Hideo Kojima born?
Hideo Kojima was born in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo on the 24th of August 1963. His father Kingo worked as a pharmacist and traveled frequently for business.
What game did Hideo Kojima release first at Konami?
The first game Hideo Kojima worked on at Konami was Penguin Adventure which significantly expanded upon the gameplay of Antarctic Adventure. He later designed Metal Gear which was released on the 13th of July 1987 for the MSX2 home computer in Japan.
Why was the game Snatcher cut to two chapters by Hideo Kojima?
Kojima planned for Snatcher to have six chapters but was instructed to trim it down to two because the team was already over the allowed development schedule. The developers were forced to end the game on a cliffhanger despite wanting to create a third chapter.
How did Hideo Kojima announce Silent Hills before its cancellation?
In August 2014 the free horror game P.T. was released without announcement on the PlayStation Store by seemingly unknown developers 7780s Studio. Its ending revealed that the game's title stands for playable teaser and that it was a demo for a new game in the Silent Hill franchise titled Silent Hills set to be directed by Kojima alongside Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro.
When was Death Stranding released by Hideo Kojima?
Death Stranding was released on the 8th of November 2019 after being announced at E3 2016. It received generally positive reviews and won awards including Best Game Direction and Best Score/Music at The Game Awards 2019.