Background and career
Hideo Kojima (小島 秀夫, Kojima Hideo; born August 24, 1963) is a Japanese video game designer, writer, director, and producer. He is best known for the Metal Gear franchise, which remains his most famous and acclaimed work. His games are noted for being highly cinematic, the result of a passion for film and literature which began during his childhood, and he is regarded as a pioneering auteur of video games. Upon joining Konami in 1986, Kojima directed, designed, and wrote Metal Gear (1987) for the MSX2. The game laid the foundation for the stealth game genre and the renowned Metal Gear franchise, which he continued to direct for 28 years up to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015). During his time at Konami, he created Boktai and produced Zone of the Enders and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, as well as directing Snatcher (1988) and Policenauts (1994), which were graphic adventure games that came to be regarded for their cinematic presentation. Kojima founded Kojima Productions within Konami in 2005, and in 2011 he was appointed vice president of Konami Digital Entertainment. In 2014, Kojima was revealed as the director for Silent Hills, the next installment in the Silent Hill franchise, via the playable teaser P.T. which has been cited as one of the greatest horror games of all time. However, the game was cancelled by Konami in 2015, shortly before Kojima's departure from the company. He then re-established Kojima Productions as an independent studio in December 2015, and, in partnership with Sony, released his first games outside Konami with Death Stranding (2019) and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (2025). Following the end of his studio's collaboration with Sony, Kojima is directing the upcoming games OD and Physint in association with Xbox. A longtime film enthusiast, he announced in 2019 that his studio would expand into film production, and is currently serving as producer for three Death Stranding adaptations.
Kojima was born in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo on August 24, 1963. He has two older siblings. His father, Kingo, was a pharmacist who frequently traveled for business and named his son Hideo as it was the most common name among the doctors he met. He moved with his family to Osaka at the age of four; he later described this stage of his early life as an abrupt change of environment that led him to spend much of his time thereafter indoors, where he would watch television or make figurines. His parents were passionate about cinema—especially European films, horror, and Wild West—and 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 also 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 and began making films together, charging other children ¥50 to see them. He tricked his parents into funding a four-day 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. By Kojima's teenage years, the family had moved to the city of Kawanishi, Hyōgo. When he was 13 years old, his father died. In interviews, he has discussed the impact of his father's death and the subsequent financial hardship faced by his family. He studied economics at university, where he decided to join the video game industry. He wrote fiction while studying, even including a short story in his thesis.
While still in university, Kojima was initially searching for a way into the film industry. He hoped that if he were to win awards for his written fiction, he would be approached about directing a film. At that time, he saw Nintendo's Famicom and thought of joining the video game industry. He said he had no friends interested in cinema to encourage him, and his friends were also not supportive when he announced his intention to enter game development. He would frequently lie about his occupation in the early days of his career, when working in video games was seen as a "very low status" job and the word for a video game designer did not exist in the Japanese language, and instead told people he worked for a financial firm; during a wedding reception, the other guests laughed at him when the groom introduced him by saying, "[Kojima's] a very talented and otherwise likeable person. But I am sorry to say that, for some unknown reason, he has decided to join a video game company." 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. He was disappointed with the job initially, hoping to make games for the Famicom, and feeling that the 16 colour palette of the MSX was too restrictive. The first game he worked on was Penguin Adventure, the sequel to Antarctic Adventure, as an assistant director. It significantly expanded upon the gameplay of Antarctic Adventure, adding more action game elements, a greater variety of levels, role-playing elements such as upgrading equipment, and multiple endings. In 2019, Polygon's 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 Warld [sic], 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. Hardware limitations hindered the development of the game's combat, and Kojima altered the gameplay to focus on a prisoner escaping instead of fighting, inspired by The Great Escape. It was released on July 13, 1987, for the MSX2 home computer in Japan, and in September that year for Europe. The player controls a special forces operative codenamed Solid Snake, who is sent to the fortified state of Outer Heaven to stop a nuclear-equipped walking tank known as "Metal Gear". Metal Gear is one of the earliest examples of the stealth game genre. A port of Metal Gear was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987, with altered graphics, difficulty, and an abridged ending without the titular weapon. Kojima has openly criticized many of the changes made in the port, including poor translation and the abridged ending. In an interview, a programmer on the NES version of the game said his team were asked to complete the port in only three months, and the NES hardware was not capable of implementing the Metal Gear fight. His next project was the graphic adventure game Snatcher, released for the NEC PC-8801 and MSX2 computer platforms in Japan on November 26, 1988. Kojima wrote and directed the game. Kojima planned for the game, a graphic adventure with visual novel elements, 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, who designed many of Snatcher's 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. It has developed a cult following in the west. In 1990, Kojima wrote a remake of Snatcher, SD Snatcher, a role-playing video game which adapted the storyline of the original Snatcher but significantly changed the environments, details of the plot, and core gameplay mechanics. The "SD" stands for "super deformed" in Japanese media, another way to reference chibi character designs. The characters are depicted in a "super deformed" art style, in contrast to the original game's realistic style. Like the original computer versions of Snatcher, it was only released in Japan. It abandoned random encounters and introduced a first-person turn-based battle system where the player can aim at specific parts of the enemy's body with guns. Such a battle system has rarely been used since, but similar ones can later be found in the role-playing games Square's Vagrant Story (2000), Bethesda Softworks's Fallout 3 (2008), and Nippon Ichi's Last Rebellion (2010). In 2007, J. C. Fletcher of Engadget said that Kojima's choice to stylise the character designs "was some postmodern playfulness from Hideo Kojima [...] downplaying the dramatic aspects of his game and overlaying obvious video game conventions on top of it", and connected that to a similar playfulness in his later games.
The original Metal Gear was a commercial success for its release on the NES, and Konami decided to create a sequel to the game, Snake's Revenge, without the involvement of Kojima. When Kojima was riding on the Tokyo transit system, he was told about Snake's Revenge by a colleague working on the project, who asked him to make a new Snake game of his own. As a result, Kojima began work on his own sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, and the two were both released in 1990. Kojima's game would not be released overseas in North America and Europe until its inclusion in Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (2006). Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake was a commercial success. The game has received positive reviews from retro-reviewers. IGN notes that Metal Gear 2 introduced stealth mechanics such as making noise to attract guards, crouching and crawling on the ground, disarming mines, and enemies having view cones. After memory limitation issues prompted him to take a break during the development of Snatcher, Kojima began to explore concepts for Policenauts. He wanted the game to remain in the adventure genre, feeling it was the best method to express what he wanted with video games. He was also growing frustrated with game development and wanted "a way to take creative control back from the programmers". After the release of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990), he developed a scripting engine so he could decide when animations and music played instead of the programmers. Development on Policenauts, originally called Beyond, began in 1990, and lasted four years. Policenauts was released in Japan on July 29, 1994, for the PC-9821. In Japan, critics praised Policenauts for its high level of presentation. Both Sega Saturn Magazine and Famitsu praised the quality of animation, voice acting, and its engrossing setting. Retrospective reviews have regarded the game generally positively, and sought to contextualise Policenauts within Kojima's body of work, as heavily stylized and influenced by films.
In 1994, Kojima began to plan a 3D sequel to Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, titled Metal Gear Solid and originally planned for release on the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer. After the 3DO was discontinued, development shifted to the Sony PlayStation. For the transition from 2D to 3D graphics, a new engine had to be developed by Kojima and his team. A gameplay demo was first revealed to the public at the 1996 Tokyo Game Show, and was later shown on day 2 of E3 1997 as a short video. The game was released to critical acclaim. Many outlets noted the game's cinematic qualities and innovative stealth gameplay. Kojima became a celebrity in video game news media, and was surprised when he began to be recognized in public.
