Hideo Kojima wants to make sure the staff at Kojima Productions are all set for the future even if he’s no longer alive, and has shared a USB stick with “all my ideas” with his personal assistant, “kind of like a will.”
Kojima has a lot of unique ideas. Only this week, the Death Stranding 2 director shared a concept for a game where the protagonist would age over time, becoming weaker but wiser, although he asserted that “no-one would buy it!” Clearly though, he must have plenty of other ideas that he thinks people would buy, and he’s letting his staff save those for if they ever need them if he’s not around.
“I gave a USB stick with all my ideas on it to my personal assistant – kind of like a will,” he tells Edge in issue 411 of the magazine. “Perhaps they could continue to make things after I’m gone, here at Kojima Productions… This is a fear for me – what happens to Kojima Productions after I’m gone. I don’t want them to just manage our existing IP.”
He talks to the publication about the experience of turning 60 in 2023, as well as when he “fell seriously ill” during the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that “until then, I didn’t think I was old, you know? I just didn’t feel my age, and I assumed I would be able to create for as long as I live.”
That experience clearly changed things for him, as he continues: “But then I became sick, and I couldn’t create anything. And I saw lots of people around me passing away at that time. I was confronted with death. Of course, I recovered, but now I was thinking, ‘Wait, how many years do I have left to make a game or a film?’ Perhaps I would have ten years?”
One thing is for sure, as he reiterates here, Kojima has made it very clear that he wants to “continue ‘creating things’ for the rest of my life.”
Hideo Kojima wanted Death Stranding 2 to have “a clearer focus on combat,” giving players a “range of approaches” including Metal Gear Solid-style stealth.
