is a Japanese video game designer, writer, director, and producer. He is best known for the Metal Gear franchise, which remains his most famous and acclaimed work. His games are noted for being highly cinematic, the result of a passion for film and literature which began during his childhood, and he is regarded as a pioneering auteur of video games.
Upon joining Konami in 1986, Kojima directed, designed, and wrote Metal Gear (1987) for the MSX2. The game laid the foundation for the stealth game genre and the renowned Metal Gear franchise, which he continued to direct for 28 years up to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015). During his time at Konami, he created Boktai and produced Zone of the Enders and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, as well as directing Snatcher (1988) and Policenauts (1994), which were graphic adventure games that came to be regarded for their cinematic presentation.
Kojima founded Kojima Productions within Konami in 2005, and in 2011 he was appointed vice president of Konami Digital Entertainment. In 2014, Kojima was revealed as the director for Silent Hills, the next installment in the Silent Hill franchise, via the playable teaser P.T. which has been cited as one of the greatest horror games of all time. However, the game was cancelled by Konami in 2015, shortly before Kojima's departure from the company.
He then Kojima Productions as an independent studio in December 2015, and, in partnership with Sony, released his first games outside Konami with Death Stranding (2019) and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (2025). Following the end of his studio's collaboration with Sony, Kojima is directing the upcoming games OD and Physint in association with Xbox. A longtime film enthusiast, he announced in 2019 that his studio would expand into film production, and is currently serving as producer for three Death Stranding adaptations.
Early life Kojima was born in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo on August 24, 1963. He has two older siblings. His father, Kingo, was a pharmacist who frequently traveled for business and named his son Hideo as it was the most common name among the doctors he met. He moved with his family to Osaka at the age of four; he later described this stage of his early life as an abrupt change of environment that led him to spend much of his time thereafter indoors, where he would watch television or make figurines. His parents were passionate about cinemaespecially European films, horror, and Wild Westand began a nightly tradition of watching a film with their children, who were not allowed to go to bed until the film had finished; his parents also did not limit the type of films the children were allowed to see, regardless of content.
Kojima took an interest in filmmaking when a friend brought a Super 8 camera to high school and began making films together, charging other children ¥50 to see them. He tricked his parents into funding a trip to an island off the coast of Japan without telling them that he was going there because he wanted to use it as a filming location; however, he instead spent his time there swimming, and changed the film's plot to be about zombies on the final day as this idea would be quicker to shoot. He did not show the film to his parents.
By Kojima's teenage years, the family had moved to the city of Kawanishi, Hyōgo. When he was 13 years old, his father died. In interviews, he has discussed the impact of his father's death and the subsequent financial hardship faced by his family. He studied economics at university, where he decided to join the video game industry. He wrote fiction while studying, even including a short story in his thesis.
Career Early career While still in university, Kojima was initially searching for a way into the film industry. 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. He said he had no friends interested in cinema to encourage him, and his friends were also not supportive when he announced his intention to enter game development. He would frequently lie about his occupation in the early days of his career, when working in video games was seen as a "very low status" job and the word for a video game designer did not exist in the Japanese language, and instead told people he worked for a financial firm; during a wedding reception, the other guests laughed at him when the groom introduced him by saying, "[Kojima's] a very talented and otherwise likeable person. But I am sorry to say that, for some unknown reason, he has decided to join a video game company."
Kojima joined video game publisher Konami's MSX home computer division in 1986. He applied to Konami because it was the only game 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.Szczepaniak, John. "Before They Were Famous". Retro Gamer (35): 74: It was really disappointing because they assigned me to the MSX division. I had joined a company in the game industry, wanting to make Famicom or arcade games, and then I was assigned to MSX. Back then MSX had only 16 colours, and on top of that, if you excluded all the colours that were hard to use, such as pink or purple, you were left with only eight colours. 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. In 2019, Polygon 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 , but the game was canceled when it was found to be too complex to run on the MSX.
Metal Gear and Snatcher (1987–1990) Kojima was asked to take over a project, Metal Gear, from a senior associate.Szczepaniak, John. "Before They Were Famous". Retro Gamer (35): 74. "The company asked me to create a combat game. Actually, a senior associate had been in charge of it but he was stuck and I was asked to do it." 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.Szczepaniak, John. "Before They Were Famous". Retro Gamer (35): 74. "You could not have more than four bullets with MSX, and that meant you could only have two to three enemies. You cannot make a combat qame with that. So I came up with a game like The Great Escape where the prisoner had to escape. It was an idea born from adverse situations." It was released on July 13, 1987, for the MSX2 home computer in Japan, and in September that year for Europe. The player controls a special forces operative codenamed Solid Snake, who is sent to the fortified state of Outer Heaven to stop a nuclear-equipped walking tank known as "Metal Gear". Metal Gear is one of the earliest examples of the stealth game genre. A port of Metal Gear was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987, with altered graphics, difficulty, and an abridged ending without the titular weapon. Kojima has openly criticized many of the changes made in the port, including poor translation and the abridged ending. In an interview, a programmer on the NES version of the game said his team were asked to complete the port in only three months, and the NES hardware was not capable of implementing the Metal Gear fight.
His next project was the graphic adventure game Snatcher, released for the NEC PC-8801 and MSX2 computer platforms in Japan on November 26, 1988."SNATCHER". Super Soft Magazine Deluxe: A.V.G & R.P.G (in Japanese). Vol. 10. 1988. pp. 3, 54. Archived from the original on October 7, 2018. Retrieved September 7, 2020. Kojima wrote and directed the game. Kojima planned for the game, a graphic adventure with visual novel elements, to have six chapters, but was instructed to trim it down to two. The team wanted to create a third chapter, but were already over the allowed development schedule so were forced to end the game on a cliffhanger. The cyberpunk-influenced game has a semi-open world design. Kojima and character designer Tomiharu Kinoshita treated the project like making a film or anime rather than a game.Konami (1989). スナッチャーライナーノーツ. Snatcher (Radio Play CD) liner notes. pp. 3–4. Archived from the original on October 13, 2018. Retrieved October 13, 2018. Former Konami artist Satoshi Yoshoioka, who designed many of Snatcher characters, said he was persistently guided by Kojima to make the game as cinematic as possible, which later critics have cited as a staple of his work. Adrian Chen of The New York Times wrote that one of his innovations was "the way he applied cinematic storytelling to console video games". Snatcher draws heavily from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), and includes enough references that the game strays near copyright infringement. A port for the Sega CD was made without Kojima, but the amount of text and length of the script made localisation expensive and time-consuming, taking three months."EGM's Nob Ogasawara Interviews Mr. Yoshinori "Moai" Sasaki..." (PDF). Electronic Gaming Monthly. No. 66. January 1995. p. 176. Archived from the original on October 7, 2018. Retrieved September 8, 2020. Snatcher was modestly successful in Japan, but the western port was a commercial failure, selling only a few thousand units. It has developed a cult following in the west.
In 1990, Kojima wrote a remake of Snatcher, SD Snatcher, a role-playing video game which adapted the storyline of the original Snatcher but significantly changed the environments, details of the plot, and core gameplay mechanics. The "SD" stands for "super deformed" in Japanese media, another way to reference chibi character designs. The characters are depicted in a "super deformed" art style, in contrast to the original game's realistic style. Like the original computer versions of Snatcher, it was only released in Japan. It abandoned random encounters and introduced a first-person turn-based battle system where the player can aim at specific parts of the enemy's body with guns. Such a battle system has rarely been used since,Kurt Kalata, Snatcher , Hardcore Gaming 101 but similar ones can later be found in the role-playing games Square's Vagrant Story (2000), Bethesda Softworks's Fallout 3 (2008), and Nippon Ichi's Last Rebellion (2010).European date fixed for the action / RPG Last Rebellion (Translation ), Jeuxvideo.com In 2007, J. C. Fletcher of Engadget said that Kojima's choice to stylise the character designs "was some postmodern playfulness from Hideo Kojima [...] downplaying the dramatic aspects of his game and overlaying obvious video game conventions on top of it", and connected that to a similar playfulness in his later games.
Metal Gear 2 and Policenauts (1990–1994)