Hideo Kojima sees Death Stranding 2 as a cautionary tale

For once, the unflappable Hideo Kojima was overwhelmed. Even close to four decades of game-making experience didn’t prepare him for his biggest tribulation so far: developing Death Stranding 2: On the Beach during the covid-19 pandemic.

“I thought I can’t pull this off. [I can’t] meet people or scan people, or shoot with people. I almost gave up. And also the staff were all remote, and I became sick as well. I thought it was just the end of the world,” he says through an interpreter as part of a group interview in Sydney. “I’ve been creating games throughout my career, but Death Stranding 2 was the most difficult challenge.”

Even his initial scouting of Australia, where Death Stranding 2 is predominantly set, had to be carried out remotely via Zoom, with Kojima painstakingly directing a local contact to document the landscape on his behalf. “Looking at it from a camera and to be there is totally different, so that’s disappointing.”

For Kojima, those experiences led to a different approach for the sequel. His own sense of isolation that arose from having to develop Death Stranding 2 with a remote team saw him reconsidering its tale — yet it’s also this isolation that led to Kojima realizing the perils of digital connectivity.

Kojima’s curiosity around Australia was eventually sated. As part of a promotional world tour for Death Stranding 2, he has made his way to Australia to chat about the game with film director and his personal hero, George Miller, at the Sydney Film Festival. So drawn is Kojima to the local sights that the noted cinephile says he hasn’t caught any movies at the festival. Instead, he spent the day at the zoo.

Kojima’s legacy as a game designer is anything but typical, from his earliest days as the creative force behind the much-acclaimed Metal Gear series to his less-than-amicable departure from Konami. And like Metal Gear’s anti-war narrative, tumultuous world events have shaped the Death Stranding series, the first game being conceptualized in the midst of a politically charged climate back in 2016. He points to key events such as Brexit and the first Donald Trump administration, with thoughts of creating a game that focused on bringing people together.

“[Back then] there was no theme in games about connections,” he explains. And a few months after Death Stranding was launched, the outbreak of covid soon upended everyday life, including Kojima’s. The isolation he felt almost mirrored the sense of solitude that’s so prevalent in the first Death Stranding. But at the same time, he seemed wary about the digital overload that came with having to stay online — to connect with one another — during the pandemic.

“We had internet when we had this pandemic. It wasn’t like during the Spanish flu,” he says. “We could order things online, we could work online, we could connect via Zoom, or you could go to concerts; they do live concerts on the internet. So the society kind of changed to being very digital.” This digital dependence struck him as “not always very healthy,” which is compounded by the prevalence of surveillance technology, such as facial recognition, during the pandemic. The sum of these experiences inspired him to rewrite Death Stranding 2 as a cautionary tale.

The contrast between the two titles’ messages lies in their logos. Kojima remarks that there’s a marked difference between the original Death Stranding’s logo and the sequel’s. Unlike in the original, the tendrils — or the “strands,” as he refers to these lines — are no longer emerging from the title, but are instead holding the name up in the sequel’s logo. “You see the strands coming to the logo. It’s almost like [The] Godfather,” he says, referring to the seminal 1972 crime film.

Seated at the front of a small conference room in the PlayStation office in Sydney, the 61-year-old Kojima appears more reticent since the previous Death Stranding world tour — perhaps a sign of weariness and prudence in the pandemic’s aftermath. When I attended the Singapore leg of the tour in 2020, Kojima shook hands with journalists and conducted individual interviews, while fans who attended the event were invited to take pictures with him. “It was an indirect connection to the game,” he said in an interview. The promotional event was, in a way, an extension of Death Stranding’s themes of connectivity.

But for the second world tour, at least in Sydney, journalists were invited to a group interview, and there was no fan interaction beyond his appearance at the Sydney Film Festival when he waved to eager fans who were hoping to catch a glimpse of the game designer before the event. I was informed by the PlayStation PR team that Kojima didn’t want to risk getting ill again for the rest of the Death Stranding 2 world tour. This feels understandable; Sydney is, after all, only the second stop, and perhaps his bout of illness during the pandemic was alarming enough that he prefers putting some physical distance between himself and the public.

Nonetheless, he is still in good spirits during the group interview, at one point even exclaiming that he is probably talking too much. “This is another reason why I’m doing this world tour. I couldn’t go out, travel, and meet people the past five years, so I thought it’s about time.”

Yet, at the heart of Kojima’s introspection is still a desire to connect with people, particularly his fans. Part of the reason he’s working on Physint is due to their desire to see another action-espionage game in the vein of Metal Gear. Death Stranding 2, meanwhile, has a greater focus on combat than the first, a feature that Kojima also partly attributed to Metal Gear’s popularity. With more players familiar with Death Stranding’s idiosyncrasies as a “delivery game,” he’s ready to make the sequel a tad more approachable. In a way, it’s his way of bringing more people together through the Death Stranding series, which he refers to as “a game of connections.”

“I think we’re a little stronger,” Kojima says of the world after pandemic lockdowns. “If you could use that experience [of connecting with one another] from the game, I want you to maybe use that experience in real life. Not just in your Death Stranding world, but after you go outside, you feel something in your real world every day, and I want you to link what you felt playing the game as well.”