\n<\/p>\n
H<\/span>ideo Kojima \u2013 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 \u201c2019\u2019s most interesting blockbuster\u201d \u2013 is still starstruck, or perhaps awestruck. \u201cGeorge [Miller] is my sensei, my God,\u201d he proclaims gleefully.<\/p>\n 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 \u201calmost my brother\u201d; the Australian even lent his appearance to a major character in Kojima\u2019s latest game, Death Stranding 2.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019s diverse and varied biosphere; the game\u2019s geography may be condensed and fantastical, but the beauty and the terror remains.<\/p>\n <\/span>Fierce friends \u2026 Hideo Kojima with George Miller at the Sydney film festival, June 2025.<\/span> Photograph: Tim Levy\/Sydney Film Festival<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI love animals, and they\u2019re unique here,\u201d says Kojima, who passed on catching some early morning festival screenings to go to the zoo instead. \u201cA lot of people [on the team] love animals \u2026 They might say no to designing a new mech, but they wanted to make more animals.\u201d<\/p>\n Film buff Kojima drops a few Australian cinematic references too \u2013 he likes the 1971 flick Walkabout, and admits DS2\u2019s subtitle, On the Beach, is a reference to the classic Melbourne-based post-apocalyptic movie of the same name (\u201cI love the original novel\u201d) \u2013 but his real reasoning behind the location choice was simple: \u201cI wanted to go to Australia.\u201d Though he\u2019s visited before, he wanted to go deeper in, \u201cto the middle of the land, the desert\u201d.<\/p>\n But because of the pandemic, Kojima\u2019s team was forced to use remote location scouts to gather data; being unable to be there in person was very disappointing, he says. \u201cIt\u2019s totally different from looking at a picture, when you\u2019re feeling it, on location.\u201d<\/p>\n Remote work, during the pandemic and beyond, has been a sticking point for the game. \u201cThe hardest thing was the performance capture,\u201d he says. Directing cast members such as Norman Reedus or L\u00e9a Seydoux remotely from Japan was the \u201cworst experience\u201d, his direction \u201calmost impossible to relay\u201d 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\u2019t utilise the main actors early on, but it wasn\u2019t always possible.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd for the new cast especially, it was quite difficult,\u201d he says, \u201cBecause I wanted to explain: this is the character, this is how I want you to act \u2013 but it was all remote!\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>An oddly moving sight \u2026 Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.<\/span> Photograph: Kojima Productions\/Sony<\/p>\n The situation eased by 2022, he says, allowing him to fly to LA and direct in person \u2013 to build a better rapport with his cast and get them more used to the nuances of acting for games. \u201cPeople who have done Marvel movies, they\u2019ve experienced performance capture, with the green backgrounds,\u201d he says. (In most cinematic games, real-world acting is translated to the digital realm through motion capture technology \u2013 which can be jarring to actors used to sets and costumes.) \u201cWe actually have a tool: if you look at the monitor, you can see the [in-game] world displayed in real time.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s grunts of pain or repeatable in-game actions like eating an apple. \u201cSometimes we\u2019d get questions from Norman, and I\u2019d say, \u2018Eat the apple and it\u2019s good\u2019, or \u2018Eat the apple and it\u2019s not good\u2019 \u2013 we want those differences! Over and over, we had to ask for those kinds of things.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Kojima at the Sydney Film Festival<\/span> Photograph: Jessica Hromas\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Death Stranding made \u201cconnections\u201d 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\u2019s tagline the ominous question: \u201cShould we have connected?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI became sick during the pandemic, and I was totally isolated,\u201d Kojima says. Compounding that, optical muscle damage from a recent eye surgery meant that he couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt seemed like, yes, we\u2019re all connected. But it\u2019s not really the connection that I imagined,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Having spoken recently about legacy (news of a USB drive \u201cfull of ideas\u201d 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. \u201cThe reason why [new hires] want to work with us is they want to learn from mentors, or become better by working with other people,\u201d he says. \u201cBut if you\u2019re purely online \u2026 it\u2019s almost like outsourcing. You want to talk and see what other people are doing, so you can expand yourself, you can grow.\u201d<\/p>\n Remote work is \u201calmost like a fast food chain; you\u2019re just concentrating on one thing instead of the whole project,\u201d he says: in a collaborative industry like game-making, it introduces inefficiencies. With people siloed off, there\u2019s no back-and-forth, he says; people discover their mistakes later and there\u2019s less room for happy coincidences, spur-of-the-moment suggestions or alternate viewpoints.<\/p>\n Aside from that, he adds, you don\u2019t get to know your team members, see how people are feeling or ask them about their hobbies. \u201cOnly 1% of yourself is on show during [online] meetings,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is not like building a team. Think about football. You hire someone, he comes to your squad \u2013 but you can\u2019t play together remotely. So that person doesn\u2019t change the way they played before; they won\u2019t fit in,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Still, \u201cyou can\u2019t force people back to the office, you can only persuade them,\u201d he says. \u201cSo not everyone came back. But the main members did, so we could work together.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018I wanted to go to Australia\u2019 \u2026 Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.<\/span><\/p>\n Despite this slightly dour tone, Kojima seemingly remains hopeful. Death Stranding is a deeply lonely game, he says animatedly during a later group presentation. \u201cBut \u2026 you find other players all over the world. You\u2019re indirectly connected \u2026 And once you turn that [game] off and go outside \u2026 you see structures in real life, like the bridge here in Sydney. Someone made that! They might have passed away years ago, but you\u2019re connected to them. Even if you haven\u2019t met the person. You are not alone in this world.\u201d<\/p>\n And there\u2019s always new horizons. Kojima has a long-held dream of visiting outer space \u2013 not a mere billionaire\u2019s suborbital hop, but something more. \u201cThat\u2019s not space,\u201d he says, firmly. \u201cI want to train properly, learn how to do the docking, go to the International Space Station and stay there for a few months \u2026 I\u2019m 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\u2019s possible.\u201d There\u2019s no gravity in space to irritate his bad back, after all, he jokes.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cIt\u2019s \u2018Tom Cruise disease\u2019,\u201d Kojima elaborates. \u201cTom Cruise finds out his worth when living with his life on the line.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hideo Kojima \u2013 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 \u201c2019\u2019s most interesting blockbuster\u201d \u2013 is still starstruck, or perhaps awestruck. \u201cGeorge [Miller] is my sensei, my God,\u201d he proclaims<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[371,372,376,378,374,373,375,377],"class_list":{"0":"post-8739","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-connected","9":"tag-connection","10":"tag-death","11":"tag-games","12":"tag-hideo","13":"tag-imagined","14":"tag-kojima","15":"tag-stranding"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}