Hideo Kojima – the acclaimed video game director who helmed the stealth-action Metal Gear series for decades before founding his own company to make Death Stranding, a supernatural post-apocalyptic delivery game this publication described as “2019’s most interesting blockbuster” – is still starstruck, or perhaps awestruck. “George [Miller] is my sensei, my God,” he proclaims gleefully.
Kojima is visiting Australia for a sold-out chat with Miller, the creator of the Mad Max film franchise, at the Sydney film festival. The two struck up an unlikely but fierce friendship nearly a decade ago, and Kojima says that, as a teenager, the first two Mad Max films inspired him to become a movie director and thus, eventually, a video game maker. At the panel later, Miller is equally effusive, calling Kojima “almost my brother”; the Australian even lent his appearance to a major character in Kojima’s latest game, Death Stranding 2.
It’s actually because of Miller that much of this latest game is set in a heavily fictionalised version of Australia, Kojima jokes. Death Stranding, a game about slogging through vast, treacherous yet gorgeous environments to deliver parcels between isolated bunkers, is particularly suited to Australia’s diverse and varied biosphere; the game’s geography may be condensed and fantastical, but the beauty and the terror remains.
In addition to sweeping, moody outback landscapes, DS2 also has some of the most vividly detailed (or at least expensive) depictions of Australian wildlife in all of gaming. Spotting the distinctive hopping gait of a kangaroo on a sun-drenched horizon was, for this decidedly urban Australian, an oddly moving sight.
“I love animals, and they’re unique here,” says Kojima, who passed on catching some early morning festival screenings to go to the zoo instead. “A lot of people [on the team] love animals … They might say no to designing a new mech, but they wanted to make more animals.”
Film buff Kojima drops a few Australian cinematic references too – he likes the 1971 flick Walkabout, and admits DS2’s subtitle, On the Beach, is a reference to the classic Melbourne-based post-apocalyptic movie of the same name (“I love the original novel”) – but his real reasoning behind the location choice was simple: “I wanted to go to Australia.” Though he’s visited before, he wanted to go deeper in, “to the middle of the land, the desert”.
But because of the pandemic, Kojima’s team was forced to use remote location scouts to gather data; being unable to be there in person was very disappointing, he says. “It’s totally different from looking at a picture, when you’re feeling it, on location.”
Remote work, during the pandemic and beyond, has been a sticking point for the game. “The hardest thing was the performance capture,” he says. Directing cast members such as Norman Reedus or Léa Seydoux remotely from Japan was the “worst experience”, his direction “almost impossible to relay” from the other side of a Zoom call. With restrictions in place during the early parts of development, the team tried to focus on scenes that didn’t utilise the main actors early on, but it wasn’t always possible.
“And for the new cast especially, it was quite difficult,” he says, “Because I wanted to explain: this is the character, this is how I want you to act – but it was all remote!”
The situation eased by 2022, he says, allowing him to fly to LA and direct in person – to build a better rapport with his cast and get them more used to the nuances of acting for games. “People who have done Marvel movies, they’ve experienced performance capture, with the green backgrounds,” he says. (In most cinematic games, real-world acting is translated to the digital realm through motion capture technology – which can be jarring to actors used to sets and costumes.) “We actually have a tool: if you look at the monitor, you can see the [in-game] world displayed in real time.”
Kojima says he tries to keep actors performing together as much as possible, though there are always exceptions where they had to record separately, especially during Covid. And then there were problems specific to games, such as the need for multiple takes on a character’s grunts of pain or repeatable in-game actions like eating an apple. “Sometimes we’d get questions from Norman, and I’d say, ‘Eat the apple and it’s good’, or ‘Eat the apple and it’s not good’ – we want those differences! Over and over, we had to ask for those kinds of things.”
Death Stranding made “connections” its thesis statement; players never see one another in-game, yet can pool resources and build structures to benefit themselves and others, creating intricate networks of services to make the long drudgery of delivery easier for everyone. So why is the sequel’s tagline the ominous question: “Should we have connected?”
“I became sick during the pandemic, and I was totally isolated,” Kojima says. Compounding that, optical muscle damage from a recent eye surgery meant that he couldn’t even watch movies or TV. The world shifted around him: everyone was bunkering down, working online, communicating through video calls as delivery people kept the world running. His game, his vision, had come true.
“It seemed like, yes, we’re all connected. But it’s not really the connection that I imagined,” he says. His company, Kojima Productions, was staffing up; he would meet new hires in person on their first day and then, due to pandemic restrictions, not see them again for the next three years.
Having spoken recently about legacy (news of a USB drive “full of ideas” he had supposedly prepared to leave behind took on a life of its own, he laughs), Kojima believes in-person collaboration remains the best way to foster new talent. “The reason why [new hires] want to work with us is they want to learn from mentors, or become better by working with other people,” he says. “But if you’re purely online … it’s almost like outsourcing. You want to talk and see what other people are doing, so you can expand yourself, you can grow.”
Remote work is “almost like a fast food chain; you’re just concentrating on one thing instead of the whole project,” he says: in a collaborative industry like game-making, it introduces inefficiencies. With people siloed off, there’s no back-and-forth, he says; people discover their mistakes later and there’s less room for happy coincidences, spur-of-the-moment suggestions or alternate viewpoints.
Aside from that, he adds, you don’t get to know your team members, see how people are feeling or ask them about their hobbies. “Only 1% of yourself is on show during [online] meetings,” he says. “This is not like building a team. Think about football. You hire someone, he comes to your squad – but you can’t play together remotely. So that person doesn’t change the way they played before; they won’t fit in,” he says.
Still, “you can’t force people back to the office, you can only persuade them,” he says. “So not everyone came back. But the main members did, so we could work together.”
Despite this slightly dour tone, Kojima seemingly remains hopeful. Death Stranding is a deeply lonely game, he says animatedly during a later group presentation. “But … you find other players all over the world. You’re indirectly connected … And once you turn that [game] off and go outside … you see structures in real life, like the bridge here in Sydney. Someone made that! They might have passed away years ago, but you’re connected to them. Even if you haven’t met the person. You are not alone in this world.”
And there’s always new horizons. Kojima has a long-held dream of visiting outer space – not a mere billionaire’s suborbital hop, but something more. “That’s not space,” he says, firmly. “I want to train properly, learn how to do the docking, go to the International Space Station and stay there for a few months … I’m not a scientist, but I could probably make games in space. I want to be the first. There are a lot of astronauts over 60, so I guess it’s possible.” There’s no gravity in space to irritate his bad back, after all, he jokes.
As we wrap up, he pauses for a moment, thinking, and adds one last ambition: he wants to be put in a situation, he says, where he risks his life doing something that would give him a feeling of really being alive. “It’s ‘Tom Cruise disease’,” Kojima elaborates. “Tom Cruise finds out his worth when living with his life on the line.”