It probably takes a lot to impress a guy like Hideo Kojima, a bona fide legend in the world of big budget games. Think about it. He’s made games that break the fourth wall, boss battles where the baddie can die if enough time IRL passes, and once he even forced players to climb a ladder for two minutes straight. Nevermind any of what happens in Death Stranding, which includes novel concepts like “throat baby.” Still, it’s striking to hear the Japanese auteur comment so starkly on the state of the games industry at large.
In a new interview with fashion company SSENSE, Hideo Kojima discusses watching Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest, an event known for world premieres of new games. But according to Kojima, he walked away feeling unimpressed with the biggest games the industry has to offer at current. Most of them, he suggested, looked similar to one another. He noticed a trend of games that have people fighting either aliens or monsters, for example.
“Even the visuals and the systems are pretty much the same," Kojima remarked. Though Death Stranding 2 is less of an action game than other contemporaries, if there’s one thing it’s known for is for its dazzling visuals. According to some fans,it’s the first ‘real’ PS5 game we’ve gotten, which speaks to how well the game approximates photo realism with its Decima engine.
Kojima does give props to indie games, though, which he believes is a space where some of the most interesting work is happening. When you look at the success of games likePeakorMage Arenaversus the soft sales and general reactions to some of the splashiest games, it’s hard to argue against him. You’d be surprised, but he might even butDeath Stranding 2in the bucket of safe games: earlier this summer,Kojima said that he wished he could make weirder gamesthan the ones he’s currently producing. Though Death Stranding as a series has some outlandish ideas in it, he feels some responsibility to make sure that the games have enough mass appeal to keep his company afloat. It’s a reasonable approach, to be sure, but it’s curious to know that while the world calls his games wild and inventive, Kojima knows he could push the envelope further.
Later on in the interview, Kojima says it’s “important to put something really new in there for the industry.” How would the industry achieve this? Maybe everyone should learn how to load and use a gun, he says in the interview before revealing that he’s trained himself to do just that.
“And I learned so many ways to kill people as well," Kojima said, offering no elaboration on what he means or why he’s training in the ways of murder.
There’s a lot to read in the full interview, which you can check out here. But if you’re curious: No,Kojima will not be playingMetal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. It’s not animosity toward Konami, necessarily. The man apparently barely plays video games at all!
