Hideo Kojima has popped up on Wired’s (fantastic) Tech Support series (did you know that we’re closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to the beginning of ancient Egypt?) answering questions about – well, himself, in the main.
While the web series has featured game developers before – including Dead Space creator and Sledgehammer Games co-founder, Glen Schofield – this interview was purely about Kojima himself and how he sets about writing, making, and even assessing his own video games.
Kojima said a number of interesting things – including how important it is that you feel “the creator’s love” in games, and encouraging player experimentation – but also opened up about his well-documented love of movies, the future of gaming, and how he tries to make a world that “makes you want to stay and play”.
He also said that he doesn’t “have” experts that offer specialised science or history knowledge, which is why he studies “daily”, reading literature, watching documentaries and news specials, as well as researching things online or at the library.
“If you’re watching and thinking, ‘I’ll be Kojima’s right-hand man!’ please contact me,” he joked.
There’s also a fascinating behind-the-scenes look into how he personally tests and tunes his games, including listening with both headphones and speakers, tweaking difficulty, and “fixing story pacing issues”.
“It’s a very crucial stage,” he said. “Not many do this, I think.”
Kojima also popped up on Netflix Japan recently, too, interviewing the Duffer Brothers at what seems to be Kojima Productions’ office. In it, the brothers admitted how much Japanese culture impacted them, particularly games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, which “really influenced the whole look of the Upside Down and the other dimension”.
They also mentioned Metal Gear Solid, but that may have been because Kojima was the one interviewing them.
“Those [games] were all discussed in the room,” they said. “It was filtered through the lens of how we remembered seeing them and playing them for the first time when we were young and filtered through our experience, but they were just as much a part of Stranger Things [as influences from The Big Three, John Carpenter, Spielberg, and Stephen King].”
