Delivering cargo across a sparse post-apocalyptic landscape, often on foot, was an unlikely premise for a blockbuster video game. In the hands of celebrated Japanese designer Hideo Kojima, however, a glorified postal simulator — albeit one with a Hollywood cast starring Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux and Elle Fanning — has become one of this year’s most critically acclaimed console games.
Heralded as a slow-paced but therapeutic masterpiece, “Death Stranding 2: On the Beach” sees freelance porter Sam Bridges delivering equipment, rations and medical supplies to isolated communities in the aftermath of a cataclysmic supernatural event. Along the way, he fights human foes and escapes the clutches of monstrous “Beached Things,” but action is the exception, not the rule. Significant gametime is dedicated to seemingly mundane tasks: managing the protagonist’s cargo load, soothing his adopted baby daughter and lots (and we mean lots) of wilderness-roaming.
In Kojima’s arthouse worlds, entertainment takes many forms. The success of his latest game is partly down to its stunning graphic landscapes, based on Mexico and Australia, which players are largely free to rove. A-list actors lent both their voices and virtual likenesses.
But it is perhaps Kojima’s mastery of complex storytelling — a reputation dating back to his hugely successful “Metal Gear” franchise in the late ’90s and early 2000s — that has made him one of the most celebrated figures in gaming, with a fervent fanbase. In the first month of release, an astonishing 79% of “Death Stranding 2” players finished the game, according to his studio’s in-house data. Completion rates for other popular “open-world” titles are, typically, half that or less.
One of the few game designers to whom the label “auteur” is frequently applied, Kojima is unapologetic about his priorities: Players’ enjoyment is, chronologically at least, an afterthought. His first goal is finding projects he “won’t get bored with.”
“Making a game takes four or five years. It’s 24 hours a day, and it requires tremendous energy, so if it’s not something I genuinely love, I can’t endure it,” he told CNN at the Disney Asia Pacific Showcase in Hong Kong. “I start with my own creative essence and then layer elements of entertainment on top.”
Kojima’s stories unfold through cinematic cutscenes, non-interactive sequences that serve emotional, as well as narrative, ends. There are more than six hours of them in “Death Stranding 2,” including flashbacks and dreams. The average player spends about 15% of their gametime simply absorbing dramatic sequences, according to an estimate by gaming site IGN. And this figure is low by Kojima’s standards — the same calculations showed that players, on average, spent 40% of his 2008 masterpiece “Metal Gear Solid 4” watching cutscenes, including a 27-minute-long one that holds the Guinness World Record for longest video game cutscene.
Both “Death Stranding 2” and its 2019 prequel grapple with humanity’s big questions. Themes span workplace automation (delivery bots threaten to put human porters like Sam out of work), pollution (prolonged exposure to a mysterious substance called chiralium causes various health problems) and climate change (storms and floods are increasingly common in this future world).
The story is not intended to be easy viewing, either. In fact, Kojima reportedly altered the sequel’s plot because early testers liked the game too much, according to French musician Woodkid, who composed its soundtrack. “He thought his work was not polarizing and not triggering enough emotions,” the Grammy-nominee told Rolling Stone earlier this year.
These reports were “half correct,” Kojima said, without specifying which half. “The things you don’t forget, even after 10 or 20 years, are the things that leave a bit of discomfort or friction,” he explained, using a food analogy to further illustrate the point: “It’s like something that’s a little hard to digest and stays in your body. You ruminate on it over and over, and gradually you come to understand it.
“Things that are too comfortable won’t stay inside the player. They won’t remain in their system, so to speak,” he continued, adding: “I intentionally set things up so that you wouldn’t understand everything unless you chewed on it multiple times.”
For Kojima, movies and novels “stay” with him for decades, so why not games, too?
The lines between multimillion-dollar video games and other forms of entertainment have become increasingly blurred. High-profile actors are treating video game character roles with greater reverence, as the opportunities have industry clout and are, typically, lucrative.
Big- and small-screen adaptations of console titles are also now commonplace. While movie studios once simply licensed intellectual property and migrated popular characters into theater-ready storylines (think “Sonic the Hedgehog” or “Tomb Raider”), streaming platforms have recently opted for more direct, or almost-scene-for-scene, remakes. The mainstream success of “The Last of Us,” a big-budget HBO TV series that closely stuck to its source material, seemingly vindicated the game industry’s storytelling potential. (HBO is owned by CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.)
It came as little surprise when Disney+ recently announced that it is turning “Death Stranding” into an animated series. A live-action movie adaptation by powerhouse indie studio A24 is also in the works. Kojima Productions, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this month, will be involved in both projects, though its founder says he is “too busy right now” to consider directing any movies himself.
Yet, despite never making a feature film, Kojima has long walked a line between game designer and director. He is one of only a handful of industry figures to be awarded a fellowship by BAFTA, the UK’s equivalent to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, an honor traditionally reserved for movie-world luminaries like Martin Scorsese and Ken Loach. And while his studio is, by no means, the only one producing compelling, cinematic games (the “Red Dead Redemption” and “God of War” series are among many others of recent years), Kojima was arguably the first.
When he launched “Metal Gear,” for Japanese mega-studio Konami, in 1987, games consoles were too simple to accommodate narrative complexity.
“Back then, games were 2D, with limited color palettes, no music and characters that couldn’t speak,” he recalled. “Everything was symbolic, and characters were basically circles or triangles.” Nonetheless, Kojima felt the medium “had a promising future,” he said. “I was convinced they would evolve.”
Evolve they did. As graphics engines and processors advanced, so did games’ capacity for drama, dialogue and philosophy. “Metal Gear” became “Metal Gear Solid,” a pioneer of the stealth genre that resembled a series of spy thrillers. The franchise enjoyed huge critical success, none more so than “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty” (released on PlayStation 2 in 2001), which is considered by many to be the world’s first “postmodern” video game. Characters broke the fourth wall as players navigated conflicting intelligence and unreliable narrators, unclear about what was or wasn’t a simulation — a game within a game. Subsequent analyses have argued that its sprawling storyline even foretold issues later posed by “post-truth” politics and the rise of social media.
Almost three decades after the first “Metal Gear,” Kojima departed Konami (in reportedly acrimonious circumstances) following the cancelation of his never-released contribution to the “Silent Hill” franchise, years into its development. He immediately set up Kojima Productions and began work on the first “Death Stranding.”
By then, Kojima had access to digital tools his younger self couldn’t have dreamed of. “I never imagined technology would advance this quickly, that we would have 4K and 8K visuals, or that we could scan real actors,” he said. It’s not that he believed these developments were impossible, he added, just that they would happen “much further in the future.”
The advent of AI may prove more transformative still. While the popular imagination of artificial intelligence often revolves around image and video generation, Kojima sees the technology’s potential in technical, not aesthetic, terms. The label “AI” has long been used in gaming to describe the behavior of non-player characters (NPCs), and the next generation of algorithms could give them unprecedented ability to learn and adapt.
“Rather than having AI create visuals or anything like that, I’m more interested in using AI in the control systems,” Kojima said. “For example, if you have 100 players, each of them will have their own habits and tendencies, their sense of control, how they move — all of that differs from person to person.
“By having AI compensate for those differences, the gameplay can gain more depth. And in most games, the enemies don’t behave very much like real humans. But by using AI, enemy behavior could change based on the player’s experience, actions and patterns. That kind of dynamic response would make much deeper gameplay possible.”
Little is known about Kojima Productions’ next game “OD,” a horror title co-written by Oscar-winning filmmaker and “Get Out” director Jordan Peele. A chilling trailer, released in September, hints at the immaculate graphics and intricate gameplay it may entail. Yet, for all of Kojima’s enthusiasm about technology, the success of his future work — like that of the past — will likely rest on a comparatively luddite quality: Its ability to spin a good, old-fashioned yarn.
