Creator / Hideo Kojima

Hideo Kojima (August 24, 1963) is a Japanese video game developer best known as the creative mind behind Konami's Metal Gear series.

Kojima became a video game director because he was not able to enter the movie industry. As a teenager, he wrote multiple "short"- stories and sent them to various publications. However, none of them were ever published as his stories oftentimes exceeded 400 pages. His works feature frequent discussions about science, history, politics and culture as well as shameless references to films - primarily American action movies, of which he is a huge fan. His games often glorify, deconstruct, reference, or pastiche Hollywood tropes - from theme naming his cast after movie characters to copying action sequences motion-for-motion. Most of his stories fit into the category of Magic Realism, featuring Humongous Mechas and magical Super Soldiers within the context of real-world settings and events.

He is also dedicated to giving his games an utterly enormous level of world detail in terms of character backstories, politics, history, culture, and science. As a direct result, his games feature so much information that it is almost impossible to find every bit on a first playthrough, starting with an absolutely gigantic in-game encyclopedia detailing the world of Snatcher, and carrying on throughout the Metal Gear series.

Kojima’s games, especially in the Metal Gear series, feature a lot of characteristics uncommon in video games. They do not feature levels or missions, but a single location (like a military base or a large jungle) where all of the story takes place. The games prior to Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker also mostly consist of cutscenes and static dialogue, with gameplay often taking up only a minority of each game's length.

He also constantly tries to surprise the audience. Each game of his features heavy plot twists and when he makes trailers, he oftentimes edits objects and characters out of certain footage and re-arranges scenes and dialogue to create a misleading impression. For example, all trailers for 2001's Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty famously edited Raiden (the game's Contrasting Sequel Main Character) out of every scene he appears in and replaced him with Solid Snake, to hide the now-infamous change in protagonists that occurs after the prologue chapter.

Kojima is also known for never talking about his stories in-depth. He often says that his stories are anti-war, yet his protagonists are regularly sent on military missions with noble goals, such as preventing a nuclear catastrophe. He also states that he never aims at writing a complex storyline, yet his plots involve a great deal of real life information that he painstakingly researches, and they always pose deep philosophical and cultural questions that characters may spend the entire game discussing. Kojima also states that he wants people to think about his stories for themselves, which might be the reason for him making such contradictory statements.

In 2015, he and Konami had a massive fallout that resulted in Silent Hills being cancelled, his name being removed from the cover of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and Kojima being prohibited from being involved in any publicity for Konami products. After his contract with Konami finally expired on December 15, 2015, Kojima established his own independent game studio and entered a partnership with Sony. At E3 2016, he revealed footage and the official title of the first new game produced under his partnership with Sony: Death Stranding.

He has written and directed the following games:

• Metal Gear (1987)
• Snatcher (1988)
• Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990)
• Policenauts (1994)
• Metal Gear Solid (1998)
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001)
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004)
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008)
• Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (2010)
• Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (2014)
• P.T. (2014)
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015)
• Death Stranding (TBA)

He has also been involved in the production of:

• Penguin Adventure (1986; see Antarctic Adventure)
• SD Snatcher (1990)
• Zone of the Enders (2001)
• Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner (2003)
• Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand (2003)
• Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django (2004)
• Metal Gear Ac!d (2004)
• Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (2004)
• Boktai 3: Sabata's Counterattack (2005)
• Metal Gear Acid 2 (2005)
• Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops (2006)
• Lunar Knights (2007)
• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (2010)
• The Enders Project (On-hold)
• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (2013)
• Silent Hills (cancelled)

In Febuary 2016, Kojima started a Web Video series called HideoTube to further reach out to his fans. The content is mostly all over the place, ranging from food to events in Tokyo to movies to the video game industry from his point of view. The videos are uploaded monthly and are in Japanese but with English subtitles.

Favorite tropes:

• Author Appeal:
  • Above all else, Kojima is a world builder. He'll reel off yard after yard of flavor text describing your surroundings, politics of the day, the latest fashions and tech toys, your teammates' pasts and motivations, philosophy, and assorted Jeopardy! trivia.
  • David Bowie is Every Metal Gear Solid Character?
  • Kojima-san also makes a lot David Bowie references in his scripts, i.e., Diamond Dogs, Major Tom (from Space Oddity), and "The Man Who Sold The World". There is also a character in MGS2 (Scott Dolph) who barks at his soldiers to "turn to the right!", which is in the David Bowie song, "Fashion".
• Author Filibuster:
  • Living on a space colony would have terrible effects on the human body.
  • People aren't defined by their genetics.
  • The unrestricted flow of digital information is dangerous, but ultimately necessary.
  • Loyalty to your country means nothing if you can't adapt to the changing times.
  • The Military-Industrial Complex is horrific, and ultimately pointless.
  • Deterrence Theory doesn't work.
  • Revenge is an inherently destructive process and will not leave you satisfied if you achieve it.
  • Pollution is bad.
• Badass Beard: He's been sporting one of these ever since leaving Konami and forming the new, independent Kojima Productions. The Big Boss parallels were not missed by fans.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall
• The Cameo: Appeared in a Mega64 video parodying the Metal Gear games.
• Contemplate Our Navels: There are often long conversations about things like Neo Kobe Pizza, movies, etc.
• Fanservice: As far back as Policenauts, his games have featured notable amounts of this. The aforementioned title featured Easter eggs where you could grope the breasts of female characters without consequence, and the Metal Gear series tends to feature at least one scantily-clad Femme Fatale per game.
• He Knows About Timed Hits: Explanations of game features are often done by characters within the game.
• Humongous Mecha
• Meaningful Name: For example, Raiden's civilian name "Jack" is a reference to a lot of things. Including an American nickname for a Japanese warplane from World War II.
• Mind Screw: One of his trademarks. A big part of the reason why people were excited for Silent Hills: based on the tech demo, it seemed he was preparing to take the recently kind-of-lackluster series in refreshingly bizarre new directions.
• Motive Rant: Oftentimes far longer than the time it takes to actually defeat the villain.
• Never Trust a Trailer: He hates it when trailers spoil the story, so he deliberately makes totally misleading trailers. He took this to its absolute limit with Metal Gear Solid 2, where the fact that Snake isn't even the main character was completely, totally obscured.
• Nice Hat: His Twitter account reveals him to be a fan of sombreros.
• Older Than They Look: Look at him again. No way the guy looks 52. This is joked by fans that he had nanomachines implanted in him.
• Sdrawkcab Name
• Significant Anagram:
  • Metal Gear Solid 4 shows that "RAT PT 01" can be an anagram for "patriot".
  • The first information released for The Phantom Pain claimed the game's director was a Swedish man named Joakim Mogren. "Joakim" is an anagram of "Kojima".
• Start My Own: After the complete fallout with Konami, Kojima did the only logical thing to do and founded his own company.
• Stealth Pun: In The Phantom Pain, the protagonist is given an injection of digoxin, which is made from a plant called foxglove, referencing the in-game military unit FOXHOUND.
• This Loser Is You: The wimpy Otacon and Raiden can be seen caricatures of the otaku and action gamers. However, both characters would gradually become more competent and courageous.
• World of Pun

Tropes he has personally stated he despises:

• Guns Akimbo: This is ironic once you remember the Ninja...
• Trailers Always Spoil: This is also ironic since he produced some trailers that does exactly that such as the "cut trailer" for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.

Some films that have inspired his work:

• Escape from New York
• Dawn of the Dead (1978)
• The Guns of Navarone
• The Great Escape
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Blade Runner
• Children of Men
• Lethal Weapon
• The Terminator and its sequel

Some other things he is known to admire:

• Assassin's Creed, to the point where he's made two different major references to it in the Metal Gear series.
• Mad Max, specifically The Road Warrior and Fury Road. He's mentioned that Road Warrior was in his personal Top Five favorite movies, only to later get dethroned by Fury Road.
• Mega64, to the points where he's even guest-starred in one of their sketches, and even commissioned them to make a trailer for his new Transfarring data system.
• Ōkami, of which was one of the reasons why he asked PlatinumGames to work on Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.
• Pokémon, which he is said to have all of the games and all of the Pokemon (including legendary) in every one of the regional pokédexes.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!. In response, they made a card in tribute of him, Tactical Espionage Expert.
• Super Smash Bros.: He wanted Solid Snake in to be included in Melee and got his wish granted in Brawl.
• Pacific Rim, which he was very happy about◊ and may have led to his later collaboration with Guillermo del Toro in Silent Hills until it was sadly cancelled.
• Gundam, with the reference to Minovsky Particles in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and his photos of himself with the Odaiba statue being just the tip of the iceberg.
• David Bowie: Several references have been made to both his albums and songs throughout the Metal Gear series, and Midge Ure's cover of "The Man Who Sold the World" was used as the main theme song of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

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DIDJURIKEIT?
!

Yes, because Kojima is God!

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