Editorial profile
Hideo Kojima joined Konami in 1986 and quickly became one of the most distinctive figures in Japanese videogame history. With Metal Gear on MSX2, released in 1987, he shifted action away from direct confrontation and toward infiltration, tension and avoidance, helping define a path that would become central to the stealth genre. It was never only about mechanics: even in the early Metal Gear games, Kojima showed a strong interest in cinematic rhythm, staging, technology, war and identity.
During the 1990s, Kojima expanded his language with Snatcher and Policenauts, works deeply shaped by cinema, science fiction and noir. They are games about memory, bodies, future cities and technology, marked by an ambition that was unusual for their time. They remain essential for understanding Kojima’s idea of videogames as narrative and authorial spaces. With Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation in 1998, that vision became global: direction, voice acting, editing, fourth-wall breaks and game design merged into a work that redefined what a videogame blockbuster could be.
His relationship with Konami reached its peak and its fracture during the years of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. That game remains a technical and systemic achievement, but also the symbol of an industrial split that eventually took Kojima away from the company where he had built his legend. In 2015 he returned as an independent creator with Kojima Productions, maintaining a strong relationship with Sony and opening a new creative phase.
Death Stranding, released in 2019, became the manifesto of this second life: divisive, personal and built around travel, connection, solitude and the rebuilding of bonds in a broken world. With Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, OD and the project known as Physint, Kojima continues to move between cinema, technology and videogames, pursuing an idea of authorship that does not always choose the easiest form, but almost always the most personal one.
His importance does not lie only in the games he directed, but in the way he forced videogames to look at themselves: as systems, as stories, as an industry and as a language. Kojima divides, fascinates, frustrates and inspires. That is exactly why he remains one of the central figures in contemporary videogame culture.
