Kojima Productions

• 1. Introduction

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  Kojima Productions exists twice. Once as a name inside Konami, and once as a name on the door of an independent studio in Shinagawa, Tokyo. That doubling is not an accident. It is the story of a creator who lost a company, then built a new one from the same blueprint and the same name.

  Hideo Kojima founded the original Kojima Productions inside Konami in April 2005. It began as a merger of several subsidiaries, including his own group at Konami Computer Entertainment Japan. At its height, the team grew to over two hundred people for a single game. Then, in 2015, Konami quietly erased the brand from its websites and buildings. A few days after that announcement, an anonymous Konami employee told the world that Kojima and his senior staff were planning to leave.

  What followed would raise a question that still hangs over the industry: what does a studio look like when it is built by a single person who has spent years thinking about everything he hated about studios?

• 2. Inside Konami

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  April 2005 was when the original Kojima Productions took shape, formed out of a consolidation that also absorbed Kojima's group at Konami Computer Entertainment Japan. Konami was following a naming style it used between 2004 and 2015 for its internal production teams.

  Kojima described the merger in almost relieved terms. Before it, he had held the position of vice president at Konami, which came with business management and administrative work that pulled him away from making games. As head of the newly named team, he could focus on what he actually wanted to do. He also retained a seat on the Konami board, which he used to advocate for his ideas within the company.

  The team started at roughly one hundred employees. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots pushed that number past two hundred. Alongside its work on Metal Gear titles, the team developed the Fox Engine, a proprietary technology built for that generation of hardware.

  Kojima Productions also established a secondary studio in March 2013, setting up shop in Playa Vista, Los Angeles. That outpost was called Kojima Productions Los Angeles. When Konami restructured in 2015, that Los Angeles operation was shut down as part of the reorganisation.

• 3. The Break From Konami

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  On the 16th of March 2015, Konami announced a structural overhaul of its game development operations, moving to what it described as a headquarters-controlled system, citing the need to respond to rapid changes in the digital entertainment market. The Kojima Productions branding disappeared from Konami's public presence within days.

  Konami publicly denied that Kojima was leaving, and Kojima himself said he was still "100% involved" in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, committed to making it the best game he could. An anonymous Konami employee had told a different story: that Kojima and the senior staff had planned their departure for December 2015, after their contracts ended and The Phantom Pain shipped.

  That December, the production team received a nomination for Developer of the Year at The Game Awards 2015. They did not win; CD Projekt Red took the award. Kojima was reportedly prevented from attending by Konami's lawyers. Kiefer Sutherland, the actor who played Big Boss, accepted the awards on behalf of the team instead.

• 4. Building the New Studio

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  On the 16th of December 2015, Kojima announced a new independent studio in a joint statement with Sony Computer Entertainment. He was joined by two colleagues who had followed him out of Konami: Yoji Shinkawa and Kenichiro Imaizumi. The new studio carried the same name as the one Konami had erased.

  Kojima had specific ideas about what kind of place this should be. He compared most Japanese development studios to armies, describing their strict hierarchies and limited respect for employees. His alternative was something he called "an intimate kind of studio" that "feels like it's family". He set a cap of one hundred employees, a ceiling he had drawn from a specific reference point: Media Molecule, the British studio he visited and cited as an inspiration. What impressed him there was not any single game but the work culture itself, particularly the number of female employees and the relaxed atmosphere.

  In 2016, the studio opened a small division in Amsterdam, located near Guerrilla Games. That proximity was deliberate. Guerrilla had developed the Decima game engine, and Kojima's studio was using it for their first project.

• 5. Death Stranding and Its Reach

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  At E3 2016, during Sony's pre-E3 conference, Kojima unveiled the first trailer for Death Stranding. The game was released by Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2019. A PC version followed in July 2020, released on Windows by 505 Games.

  Imaizumi left the studio in 2019, the same year the game launched. In April 2020, the office temporarily closed after an employee contracted COVID-19.

  The studio's relationship with Death Stranding did not stop at the original release. In November 2024, Kojima Productions announced that it had reclaimed the intellectual property rights to Death Stranding from Sony Interactive Entertainment. With those rights back in hand, the studio brought the Director's Cut to Xbox Series X/S, the Microsoft Store for Windows, and Amazon Luna on the same day as the announcement.

  A sequel, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, was officially confirmed at The Game Awards 2022. Its subtitle and a 2025 release window were confirmed on the 31st of January 2024, during a State of Play presentation by Sony. The game was released in 2025.

• 6. Expanding Beyond Games

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  In November 2019, Kojima Productions announced it was moving into film. Two years later, in November 2021, the studio said it would open a dedicated Los Angeles division for films and television.

  In December 2022, two partners were named for a live-action Death Stranding film: Hammerstone Studios would provide funding, and A24 would also be involved in the production. An animated film, working under the title Death Stranding: Mosquito, is being made in partnership with ABC Animation and Lyrical Animation. A Disney+ animated series, working under the title Death Stranding Isolations, is being co-produced with E&H Production with a planned year of 2027.

  The studio also co-produced a documentary about Kojima himself. Released in 2024, Hideo Kojima: Connecting Worlds was made with PlayStation Studios and Filmworks and distributed by Disney+.

  On the 31st of January 2024, alongside the Death Stranding 2 reveal, Kojima announced Physint, a project described as both a film and a video game, built in collaboration with Columbia Pictures. Described as an action-espionage title, it was scheduled to enter full development once work on Death Stranding 2 was complete.

• 7. OD and the Strike

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  Kojima and Jordan Peele appeared together at The Game Awards 2023 to reveal OD, described as a horror game, developed in partnership with Xbox Game Studios. The project had first surfaced in June 2022, when Kojima announced at Microsoft's digital presentation that the studio was working on something with a "never before-seen concept" using Microsoft's cloud technology.

  On the 31st of December 2024, Kojima publicly disclosed the impact of the video game actors' strike on both active projects. Actor scanning and filming for OD had been suspended. Casting for Physint had also been put on hold. The statement named the strike directly as the cause.