The Life and Death of Hideo Kojima

As he prepares for the release of his latest monolith, Death Stranding 2, the pioneering video game director continues to inject his iconoclastic vision into ever-more ambitious projects: massive games, an A24 movie, artisitic collaborations. But, after facing health problems, he's starting to think, for the first time, about the projects that he might not get to finish.

- SAM WHITE

FOR THE FIRST 58 YEARS of his life, Hideo Kojima did not think about the fact that one day, he will die. As a boy, growing up in Japan in the 1960s, time seemed still. Even after he turned 30 and created Metal Gear Solid—the 1998 PlayStation classic that pioneered cinematic storytelling in games—he remembers thinking his next three decades would feel just as long as the first. A flash and they went. Then, in 2020, isolated during Covid as he neared 60, he fell seriously ill. “I thought that I could never recover,” he says. “I felt like I might not ever be able to create a game again.”

It was the first time he'd ever thought about his lifespan; that there were things he would never get to make. Games, sure, but also films and perhaps other things entirely. “I had all these ideas,” he says. “So I wrote them down and passed them to my PA, as if it were my will.” He had visions of becoming a ghost—unable to create for eternity. “I kind of understood why people commit suicide. It was the end of the world.”

Around the same time, Kojima had worsening eye pain. He couldn't go outside. Worse still: “I couldn’t watch movies or TV?” He likes to watch at least one film a day. He was struggling to see well enough to develop Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. In his haste to recover, he elected to have eye surgery that then damaged his optical muscles—the part of the eye that lets you focus. At one point, just before he was on the jury at the Venice Film Festival, he was alternating between 10 pairs of glasses. “The doctor kept saying that the brain would adjust,” he says. “I was not convinced.”