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.
Image: Kojima Productions
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.
“I’ve been creating games throughout my career, but Death Stranding 2 was the most difficult challenge.”
“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.
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