If there’s any game that made me question every single aspect of it, from the mechanics to the story to why I was even carrying a crying baby in a bottle across a dystopian America, and still had me completely hooked, it’s Death Stranding.
It was strange, sometimes baffling, yet absolutely captivating. That’s thanks to the creative genius behind it: Hideo Kojima. His creativity isn’t outside the box; it’s orbiting a distant star while we’re still figuring out the instruction manual. So, when he revealed he’s limiting himself? That stunned me.
We’re living in Kojima’s safe zone, and that’s the scary part
As I sit here waiting for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach on June 26, I can’t help but wonder what fresh slice of surrealism Hideo Kojima will throw at us next. The first game made me feel like I was playing a philosophical art piece disguised as a sci-fi courier simulator.
Death Stranding 2 promises to expand that world, not just in scale but in perspective. It’s Kojima, so this time, I will most likely not be asking about “what happens next,” but more in the lines of “what the hell does it mean this time?”
To top it off, Kojima wasn’t thrilled about all this positive reception delivered by testers. Why? From his perspective, that means the game was not out of the box enough. And, now in an interview with GQ, he confessed that while he has even weirder ideas brewing.
But he holds himself back from executing them. Why? Because he’s deeply connected to his team at Kojima Productions, not just as coworkers, but as people with lives and families. He said:
If I do that, and it doesn’t sell, my studio will go bankrupt. I know all the staff. I know the families of the staff. I have this burden on my shoulders.
He feels the weight of responsibility, the pressure of not just delivering something great but something that can sustain the livelihoods of those around him.
For someone who went independent to gain creative freedom, it’s ironic and heartbreaking that his boldest ideas remain shelved out of fear that they could collapse everything he’s built with his team.
What would Kojima unleashed even look like??
Here’s the thing: even when Kojima is “limiting” himself, we still get things like Death Stranding and its sequel, Physint, and the upcoming horror experience OD. These games aren’t just outside the box; they’ve kicked the box off a cliff and are exploring what reality looks like after it breaks.
Physint, for instance, was born after Kojima got seriously sick during the pandemic, forcing him to confront his own mortality. It’s a game rooted in legacy, mortality, and espionage, and it exists because people kept asking for “something like Metal Gear.” (He revealed in his podcast.)
But instead of repeating himself, Kojima reimagined what that genre could look like in today’s world. Now, imagine if he really had nothing holding him back. No studio to protect. No mouths to feed. No expectations to manage.
In his own words, he dreams of making things “even weirder,” ideas that could very well challenge the definition of a game itself. He’s even preparing concepts to hand off after his death. That’s how singular his vision is.
So yes, while we’ve seen the strange, I can’t help but ache with curiosity: What kind of madness are we missing out on because Kojima cares too much?
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
