Hideo Kojima: Video Game Creator Extraordinaire

Hideo Kojima: Creator of Metal Gear Series

Hideo Kojima is a Japanese video game designer and creator and the creative mind behind the award winning Metal Gear franchise, a series of spy/action games with complex and intricate mind boggling lore.
Kojima created his first game, Metal Gear, at the age of 24. Metal Gear was a game unlike the rest of its time. Instead of focusing on action packed game-play where players were encouraged to eliminate enemies in a fashion similar to Sylvester Stallone's Rambo, he designed his games to focus on stealthy high risk operations, such as sneaking into KGB facilities and disarming nuclear missiles. According to The Atlantic, he took much inspiration from American TV shows to create intense cinematic plots that were uncommon outside of the Fantasy/Role-Playing- Games of the time. As a result, Metal Gear became an underground hit for the most hardcore gamers.


After his initial success, Kojima went on to create seven more sequels and spin-offs solidifying himself as a creative giant in the video game industry. Many still recount how terrifyingly ingenious some of his games were as in Metal Gear Solid,  the villain Psycho Mantis would flex his psychic powers by vibrating your controller or commenting on the games you have saved to your memory card. Another incidence of creative genius occurs in Metal Gear Solid 3:Snake Eater where if the player gets stuck on the boss match with "The End" but leaves the game alone for 3 weeks, the boss will die of old age. 

Kojima holds himself highly and expects much out of himself when creating video games. He is extremely meticulous and detail oriented, making sure all aspects of his games fit together. On his Twitter account he states,"  Let’s say we imagine a hallway the player is meant to walk down according to the game design. The hallway has meaning in the plot as well as the game design. Is the purpose to deliver the story, to practice controls, to show scenery, or to add rhythm to the gameplay?”. To maintain cohesion of all aspects of his games, Kojima also shames outsourcing. From another Tweet, he writes, "When everything is outsourced, the parts that come back just don’t fit together. That is why it’s important to take charge of the little details everyday." His fine attention to detail and in house work on all his games ensure a quality that not many game franchises can even come close to. 

Scene from "The Abyss"

Kojima outlines how he manages himself when creating games and finding inspiration to fulfill his own need for perfection. In an interview with IGN, he says he receives inspiration 24 hours a day. He takes in everything from his environment: things he hears in conversations, things he sees in movies, what he reads in books, etc. The hardest part for Kojima is meshing all this inspiration together into something original. He deals with these difficulties in a unique way. When he is stuck, he watches the making of James Cameron's The Abyss. He states that it gives him courage. He then takes a fistful of painkillers and moves on. Kojima finishes the interview saying that he must either love the project he is working on  and have faith in himself or it would be impossible for him to complete his project.

 While completing large projects, Kojima is an avid supporter of teaming up with experts within and without of the video game industry to push the video game medium to new levels. For the new game Silent Hills, Kojima teamed up with movie director Guillermo del Toro and horror manga artist Junji Ito. Even though Kojima had little to no experience in the horror genre, he was able to release the game demo P.T. which frightened players across the world while incorporating the ideas he received from del Toro and Ito.

Yoji Shinkawa (Left) and Hideo Kojima (Right)

While working on the Metal Gear series, Kojima routinely collaborates with long time friend and creative partner Yoji Shinkawa. Kojima says they work together so well because of their different approaches to creating. Kojima thinks of an idea and builds characters around the idea. Shinkawa makes multiple sketches of the character he desires to make and then combines the best aspects of each sketch into a final rendition of the character. Combining these two approaches helps Kojima to consistently create unique and interesting characters for his games. 


Kojima even credits teamwork as the reason Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance  was released. During the game's development, it was going to be shut down by Konami, the publisher for the Metal Gear series. To stop this, Kojima teamed up with Platinum Games. Despite each developer's unique specialties, they were able to come together to publish a groundbreaking video game masterpiece. 

Ultimately what makes Kojima a creative mastermind is his ability to take inspiration from his surroundings and work tirelessly to fuse them into one idea and then collaborate with other experts to take this idea and flesh it out into video games that redefine the medium as a whole. 

Sources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/how-hideo-kojima-became-a-legendary-video-game-designer/254831/
https://www.ign.com/articles/2016/11/18/hideo-kojima-explains-the-ups-and-downs-of-the-creative-process

https://www.technochops.com/metal-gear-solid-creator-hideo-kojima-shares-creative-creation-process/6289/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo35wTSUQ3s