Gaming
Games
Hideo Kojima on the birth of Death Stranding
It’s not Metal Gear, but as the gaming auteur reveals, his new PS4 game is still pure Kojima.
Mads Mikkelsen joue le méchant de Death Stranding
© Kojima Productions
Hideo Kojima is a special type of power creative. If you want to understand what drives the visionary game developer behind the gaming behemoth Metal Gear Solid, you can't just consume a trailer like the one for his new game Death Stranding as a traditional piece of entertainment.
The soundtrack is always painstakingly picked – and probably won't even feature in the final game. You need to look at it from an art perspective with all the symbols – cables crawling down a dilapidated bridge like snakes – sneaking up on a character modelled on Casino Royale and Star Wars: Rogue One villain Mads Mikkelsen.
"Art lives off its interpretation. When I stand in front of a painting, I might end up seeing totally different things in it than another person. That's what is fascinating for me, and I sort of try to implement these techniques from painters in the creation of a trailer," Kojima once explained at the famous Smithsonian Art Museum.
"It's fine when it's a little bit confusing. Looking at Twitter and Reddit, people love to do their very own interpretations. Not all of that is correct, but that's the fun part. Personally, I'm not a big fan of movie or game trailers that give away all their secrets within a couple minutes."
Talking to Kojima after the release of the trailer, it's clear his view on this hasn't budged one bit. Death Stranding is still very much an enigma – as is his acrimonious split from his longtime publisher, Konami, towards the end of the production of Metal Gear Solid V.
Kojima on his Konami depature
"Originally I'd planned to fly a bit low key. I wanted to do an indie game, something on a smaller scale," Kojima tells Red Bull Games at the Anaheim Convention Center in California. He's in great spirits, all the pressure from his dramatic Konami departure gone. "But, well, my good friend [film director] Guillermo del Toro said, 'No Hideo. You can't do that, people want more and you have to give them a new big game'."
Del Toro and Kojima first met during the screening for Hellboy 2 in Tokyo, became friends and started production on a Silent Hill reboot, which was shot down by Konami despite the critical acclaim received by a playable tease.
After a dramatic 2015, Kojima can laugh again
© Kojima Productions
Del Toro was originally going to work behind the scenes in their partnership, but for Death Stranding, Kojima Productions upcoming PS4 exclusive game, the Hollywood director is playing an even bigger part than planned. As the second trailer reveals, he was 3D scanned and plays a big role in the game, clutching a robot fetus in a jar, a classic bit of Kojima nightmare fuel.
What does the scene mean? Kojima is cryptic, but we can take a guess. He's wearing a suit and could be an American politician in some post-apocalypse North American state, perhaps even the president, given that his pin reads 'Bridges – United Cities of America'. Many American authority figures wear a pin, from secretary to senator. "It's [Del Toro's] voice, but we use an actor for the full performance motion-capturing because I don't want to steal too much time of Guillermo. He would get involved too much, and I want him to focus on his movies," Kojima jokes.
Given how popular the Japanese game designer is across the globe, how much hype his trailers generate and how scores for his games typically go through the roof, it wasn't too tough for the legendary creator to start hiring for a new team after the departure from Konami.
Even though building up an entirely new studio from scratch proved to be a challenge for his management team, consisting of Metal Gear lead artist Yoji Shinkawa and producer Ken Imaizumi. "It was a big challenge. So I was searching for a partner, and Sony Playstation was the perfect fit," Kojima says.
Not only programmers, designers, software engineers and graphic artists applied for jobs, but also some big names from Hollywood.
I was humbled how much support I got from a big number of studios
"I felt very grateful and humbled when so many studios and people across the entire industry offered their support," he says. Although, even though Kojima is keen on not talking about his dramatic departure from Konami, it's clear that his former employer didn't allow him to take the FoxEngine from Metal Gear Solid V with him. Luckily, Sony had its own in-house alternative.
'I was on the hunt for a new engine, so I've done quite a trip together with Marc Cerny around the world.' Cerny is the lead architect of the Playstation 4 and Playstation 4 Pro. "When we visited Guerrilla Games and I played Horizon: Zero Dawn, I felt in love with their philosophy of technology. And then things went quickly in an almost crazy way.
"Hermen Mulst [Guerilla Games managing director] sent me this cool box with a USB drive containing the entire source code of the engine. This was quite a special moment for me because at that time we didn't even have a contract. They just trusted me and my team with the code base. It's fair to say that Hermen is as insane as I am," Kojima laughs.
What started out as a tech collaboration quickly evolved into a friendship between Guerrilla and Kojima Productions, and they're currently setting up a satellite studio in Amsterdam next to Guerrilla. "If someone out there wants to work with us, please apply and join," says Mr. Kojima with a big smile.
The Hollywood Death Stranding dream team
Kojima's been leading the recruitment drive personally, we learn. "I like to call people myself directly on the phone," he says. "So I've talked to Guillermo, he gave me the number of Norman [Reedus, who plays Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead], and he turned out to be quite a fan. I am a huge fan of The Walking Dead and his work, and he kinda likes my games.
"We worked on a different project together [the cancelled Silent Hill reboot] and he was pretty sad that it ended. So I asked him whether he want to come on board, and now we're actually collaborating on a deep level because we're developing his character together and talk a ton about ideas and inspirations, camera angles and storytelling. It went the same way with Mads [Mikkelsen, who plays Galen Erso in Star Wars: Rogue One], who plays the main villain in Death Stranding."
Guillermo Del Toro appears to play a politician
© Kojima Productions
And because Kojima will always remain Kojima, we're not getting any more details on the story than that (though for context, Metal Gear's lore took in everything form the Cold War to nano-machines, bipedal robots, zombies and watermelons. So, expect crazy). "It's too early to talk about the broader details of the story or to reveal the female lead, but we have a core structure already," as he frames it.
It's probably for the better if you don't expect Death Stranding to get a release window earlier than 2018, we'd hazard to guess.
First gameplay secrets about Death Stranding
While Kojima isn't ready just yet to talk about game details, simply saying, "there's a ton of information and hints in the trailer." Hermen Hulst from Guerrilla Games however shared some secrets.
Kojima uses the engine of Horizon: Zero Dawn
© Kojima Productions
"Our engine, called Decima, is able to pull off an extreme level of detail, even in a vast open world. With 'Physical Based Rendering' we can give every material its own touch and really go into details. Whether it's skin on a face, animated hair in different weather conditions or the dusty metal of a war helmet."
And what's even more interesting tied to Death Stranding, Hulst especially mentions and shows how large crowds act in a very realistic way in an urban setting. Given that the recent trailer showcases a war-torn city with planes in the sky, tanks and soldiers crossing a bridge, this gives some subtle hints on possible blending in with the crowd, perhaps akin to what we're used to in Assassin's Creed.
That would be quite a departure from the Metal Gear series, which rarely operated with civilians in populated cities. Kojima also recently mentioned that, "Death Stranding is fully playable in single player, but also a unique co-op experience, where I want to tie people together with the equivalent of ropes. Also, the story is all about connections, that are called 'strands' in psychology."
Mikkelsen is connected to his soldiers via cables
© Kojima Productions
This explains why in the gameplay Mads Mikkelsen's antagonist is connected via black braided cables to a bunch of soldiers, and seems to control them that way (telepathy being a hallmark of Kojima games). And even though Kojima is tightlipped about characters in the story, it appears that people from different time zones are trapped within the same scenario, because we're seeing modern tanks and soldiers wearing high-tech goggles, but also American Paratroopers from World War II – so perhaps some sort of afterlife?
The game also appears to be about global pollution, because in every trailer so far we've seen dead dolphins stranded in thick oil. But who knows, perhaps that's a red herring: you might remember the burning whale from The Phantom Pain trailer, which turned out to be just a hallucination from Big Boss.
What Kojima wants to talk about though is tech. "Decima is a groundbreaking rendering engine, but if we would create the same worlds there's no point to that. Horizon: Zero Dawn has this fantastic artistic vision, but we're more aiming for a very photorealistic style. I'm a big fan of physical based lighting, and we've created something which we call 'Glass Room', which is literally just a meeting room, where we can check the quality of reflections and accuracy of lighting on every single object, like tanks or the baby doll."
What this weird baby doll with needles in its head represents remains Kojima's secret for now. But the gameplay we’ve seen so far really is gameplay. "Yes, it was rendered in real-time on a PS4 Pro. And it will look much better when the game comes out," enthuses Kojima.
For more games coverage, follow @RedBullGames on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
