Hideo Kojima is considered a legendary developer by many gamers, but in his early days, he faced a lot of resistance.
Who is it about? The Japanese game developer Hideo Kojima spoke in a podcast on YouTube about his beginnings in the gaming industry, among other things.
- Kojima is known as the creator of the “Metal Gear” series. Among many gamers, he has since achieved a kind of legendary status. The games are appreciated by fans, among other things, for their story. Kojima is regarded as a lover of the art of film and is often seen as a kind of “filmmaker of the gaming industry.”
- The Metal Gear boss enemy Psycho Mantis is still considered a stroke of genius to this day. He could read his opponent’s thoughts and thus avoided all attacks from players. To defeat him, one had to plug the controller into a different socket on the PlayStation 1.
- Kojima’s most recent work, Death Stranding, was released in 2019 for the PlayStation 4 and was produced by his own studio called Kojima Productions.
- Kojima is currently working on a sequel. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is set to release in 2025.
In Kojima’s early days in the gaming industry, games with deep stories were rather rare – so he became a regular at a library and did a lot of research to change that.
If you want to get a sense of Kojima’s games, here is the launch trailer for Death Stranding:
What does Kojima say about stories in games? In the podcast, Kojima shares that it was difficult in his early days to give games a story because everyone was against it. He was even criticized for going to the library for research:
Back then, there wasn’t much one could do. I wanted to go to the library to research things like plotlines. When I went there during work, people said, “You don’t need to go to the library.” I asked why, and they told me, “Because games don’t need stories.”
However, this did not stop Kojima, he reports. Instead, he took the proverbial reins into his own hands: “So, I paid for everything out of my own pocket, for example, when I wanted to buy books. I read about 300 books to develop a game.”
Later, Kojima shares in the podcast that he generally had a difficult standing when he started in the industry. He did not want to make only arcade games without stories, where it was just about quickly shooting at enemies or objects.
Moreover, no one in the company wanted to work with him because he was the newcomer who had never developed a game. However, that changed after his first small success. After that, he became the guy who makes “weird stuff.” One such “weird idea” from Kojima was ultimately discarded: Developer legend Hideo Kojima once toyed with the idea of making you fight a boss for 2 weeks.
