Hideo Kojima

Hideo Kojima (小島 秀夫) is a Japanese video game designer.

He is regarded as an auteur of video games.

He developed a strong passion for film and literature during his childhood and adolescence.

Kojima was born on August 24, 1963, in Setagaya, Tokyo.

He was the youngest of three children.

His father, Kingo, was a pharmacist who frequently traveled on business, and named Kojima after the most common name among doctors he met.

When he was four years old, his family moved to Osaka.

Describing that stage of his early life, Kojima said it was an abrupt change of environment, and he spent much of his time thereafter indoors, watching television or making figurines.

While the family lived in Osaka, his parents began a tradition of the family watching a film together each night, and he was not allowed to go to bed until the film had finished.

They were fond of European cinema, westerns, and horror, and did not limit the type of films he was allowed to see.

Kojima took an interest in filmmaking when a friend brought a Super 8 camera to school.

They began filming movies together, charging other children 50 yen to see them.

Kojima tricked his parents into funding a trip to an island off the coast of Japan without telling them he wanted to film there.

Instead of filming, he spent his time swimming, and on the last day changed the plot to being about zombies.

He did not show the film to his parents.

By Kojima's teenage years, the family had moved to Kawanishi, Hyōgo, in the Kansai region of Japan.

When he was 13 years old, his father died.

Kojima has discussed the impact of his father's death in interviews, and the subsequent financial hardship faced by his family.

He enrolled at university to study economics, and it was there that he decided to join the video game industry.

He wrote fiction while studying, even including a short story in his thesis.

While still in university, Kojima was initially searching for a way into film production.

He hoped that, if he were to win awards for his written fiction, he would be approached about directing a film.

At that time, he saw Nintendo's Famicom and thought of joining the video game industry.

Kojima said that he had no friends interested in cinema to encourage him; his friends were also not supportive when he announced he intended to enter game development.

He would frequently lie about his occupation in the early days of a career, when a word for game designer did not exist in the Japanese language, and instead told people he worked for a financial firm.

In 1986, he was hired by Konami, for which he designed and wrote Metal Gear (1987) for the MSX2, a game that laid the foundations for stealth games and the Metal Gear series, his best known and most appreciated works.

Kojima joined video game publisher Konami's MSX home computer division in 1986.

He applied to Konami because it was the only games developer listed on the Japanese stock exchange.

He was disappointed with the job initially, hoping to make games for the Famicom, and feeling that the 16 colour palette of the MSX was too restrictive.

The first game he worked on was Penguin Adventure, the sequel to Antarctic Adventure, as an assistant director.

It significantly expanded upon the gameplay of Antarctic Adventure, adding more action game elements, a greater variety of levels, role-playing elements such as upgrading equipment, and multiple endings.

It was released on July 13, 1987, for the MSX2 home computer in Japan, and on September in that year for Europe.

At Konami, he also produced the Zone of the Enders series, as well as wrote and designed Snatcher (1988) and Policenauts (1994), graphic adventure games regarded for their cinematic presentation.

Kojima founded Kojima Productions within Konami in 2005, and he was appointed vice president of Konami Digital Entertainment in 2011.

Kojima Productions split from Konami in 2015, becoming an independent studio.

His studio's first game without Konami, Death Stranding, was released in 2019.

In 2019, Polygon's Julia Lee wrote that for "a game made over 30 years ago, Penguin Adventure had some in-depth features".

After Penguin Adventure, Kojima started to design a game called Lost Warld [sic], but the game was canceled when it was found to be too complex to run on the MSX.

Kojima was asked to take over a project, Metal Gear, from a senior associate.

Hardware limitations hindered the development of the game's combat, and Kojima altered the gameplay to focus on a prisoner escaping instead of fighting, inspired by The Great Escape.