Metal Gear was a war game about not fighting. Hideo Kojima made it in 1987 for the MSX2, the least powerful machine his Konami division worked on. The hardware could not carry a big action game, so he built one around sneaking past guards instead. Eleven years later the same idea, in 3D and wrapped in long voiced cut-scenes, became Metal Gear Solid. His later games at Konami and his own studio have kept the same mix: stealth, long stories, jokes aimed at the player, and ideas that do not always work.
Fast facts
- Born: 1963, in Tokyo.
- Joined Konami: 1986, as a planner in its home computer division.
- First game: Penguin Adventure (MSX, 1986), as assistant director.
- Breakthrough: Metal Gear (MSX2, 1987).
- Other 1980s and 1990s games: Snatcher (1988), Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990), Policenauts (1994).
- PlayStation: Metal Gear Solid (1998) and its sequels.
- Kojima Productions: a studio inside Konami from 2005, independent from December 2015.
- Since leaving Konami: Death Stranding (2019) and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (2025).
Getting into games
Kojima wanted to make films. He told Edge in 2004 that he wrote stories as a teenager and sent them to magazines, which never printed them: “The magazines wanted 100-page stories, but mine used to be around 400 pages long.” He made short films with a friend’s 8mm camera. He studied economics, and when he chose games over a bank job, “all of my friends and teachers said that I was crazy,” he told Retro Gamer. At a wedding soon after he joined Konami, the master of ceremonies introduced him as “a man of great talent, which he’s throwing away at Konami”.
He joined Konami’s home computer division as a planner in 1986. He had hoped to work on arcade games, but was put in the MSX team. His first job was as assistant director on Penguin Adventure, the follow-up to Antarctic Adventure. His first game of his own, Lost World, was dropped after six months, and Kojima said later that he felt like leaving. He stayed because, as he put it, he “needed to finish at least one project”.
Metal Gear
Kojima described his MSX team to Retro Gamer as the one with the “lowest technology” in a division that also made arcade and Famicom games. “Imagine that you are making two different kinds of movies in one division. One is making a Hollywood blockbuster movie … and the other team is creating a silent B&W picture. I was on this B&W movie team.” Retro Gamer explains that the MSX2 could not carry an all-out action game, so the military game he was given became a game about staying hidden.
Metal Gear came out on the MSX2 in 1987. The player’s soldier, Snake, gets into the fortress of Outer Heaven, avoiding guards. If a guard spots him, the game switches from its “sneak” mode to “alarm” mode. When The Games Machine reviewed the £20.95 cartridge in Britain in December 1987, it had “no information concerning which of the 60 possible Japanese authors who create for the MSX are responsible for Metal Gear”. Metal Gear was not the first game about avoiding guards: Castle Wolfenstein had patrolling guards and a stolen uniform in 1981. The stealth mechanics entry traces that history.
Most Western players met the Famicom version, released in America on the NES. Kojima told Edge he “wasn’t involved” with it, and Retro Gamer describes how much it changed: dialogue was cut, levels were redrawn, and the Metal Gear itself, the walking nuclear weapon the game is named after, was left out. An NES sequel, Snake’s Revenge (1990), was made without Kojima. His own sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, came out on the MSX2 in Japan in 1990, with guards who turn their heads on patrol and hear the player knock on walls. It stayed in Japan until Konami added it to Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence in 2006.
Snatcher and Policenauts
Between the two Metal Gear games Kojima wrote and directed Snatcher (1988), a cyberpunk adventure for the NEC PC-8801 and the MSX2. It follows a detective, Gillian Seed, in a future city where machines called Snatchers kill people and take their place. Retro Gamer notes how much it borrows from the films Blade Runner and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Most Western players found it on the Sega Mega-CD in 1994. Computer and Video Games later called that version “one of the best games on the Mega-CD”, praising its “gripping, hilarious plot”.
Policenauts (1994) followed on the NEC PC-9821 and then the 3DO, PlayStation and Saturn: a detective story set on a space colony, which Konami never translated into English. 3DO Magazine found it “hard to judge any game which principally involves interrogations and scene examinations in a foreign language”, but praised its art and its shoot-outs.
Metal Gear Solid
Kojima had wanted to do more with Metal Gear than the MSX allowed. He told Edge in January 1998 that he first thought of a polygon Metal Gear when he heard rumours about the PlayStation. Metal Gear Solid, released in Japan in September 1998, was Kojima’s first 3D game, as it was for most of his team of about 25. Its story ran on cut-scenes of a length few games had tried, and its psychic boss, Psycho Mantis, read the player’s memory card. The Metal Gear Solid entry covers the game.
It made Kojima well known outside Japan. He directed Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001) and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004) for the PlayStation 2. The second game upset many players by replacing Snake for most of the story with a new hero, Raiden. For the third, set in the Cold War, Edge reported that Kojima wrote most of the script himself; he said he read “a lot of contemporary history” for it.
He also worked on games outside the series. Zone of the Enders (2001) was a robot action game for the PlayStation 2, sold with a demo of Metal Gear Solid 2. Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand (2003) put a light sensor in its Game Boy Advance cartridge, so that players had to go outside into sunlight to charge their weapon.
Kojima Productions inside Konami
In 2004 Kojima told Edge: “In the future I don’t want to pay attention to money, demographic data, etc — I want to become freelance and create the games I always dreamt of.” The next year Konami turned his studio, KCET West, into Kojima Productions. Edge described it as “a creative environment intended to release the auteur designer from the last vestiges of corporate control”. The studio made Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots for the PlayStation 3, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (2010) for the PSP, and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015).
In 2014 Kojima’s studio released P.T., a “playable teaser” for the PlayStation 4, in which the player walks the same corridor again and again. It presented itself as unrelated to anything, Wireframe recalled, but turned out to be a proof of concept for Silent Hills, a game Kojima was making with the film director Guillermo del Toro.
Leaving Konami
Metal Gear Solid V was Kojima’s last game for Konami. In 2015 Silent Hills was cancelled and P.T. was withdrawn from the PlayStation Store. At The Game Awards on 3 December 2015, where Metal Gear Solid V won awards, the host Geoff Keighley told the audience that Kojima “was informed by a lawyer representing Konami just recently that he would not be allowed to travel to tonight’s awards ceremony to accept any awards”. On 16 December Sony announced an agreement with Kojima Productions, now “a newly formed studio”, to make a PlayStation 4 game. “I will be taking on a new challenge by establishing my own independent studio,” Kojima said. The Konami entry covers the company’s side of that year.
Death Stranding
That game was Death Stranding, released for the PlayStation 4 in November 2019, with Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen and Léa Seydoux in its cast. The player is Sam Porter Bridges, a courier in a ruined America, carrying cargo on foot between isolated settlements and reconnecting them to a network. Much of the play is balance and route-finding: stacking loads, placing ladders over rivers, and sneaking past largely invisible ghosts. Players never meet, but can leave signs and equipment in each other’s worlds.
Reviewers were split. Wireframe gave it 62% and called it “clumsy, dull, and pretentious”, but “absolutely a game worth playing, even if it’s not a great one”. Its reviewer changed his mind from day to day: one day he “couldn’t force myself through half an hour”, the next he played for four hours without a break.
Later projects
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach came out on the PlayStation 5 on 26 June 2025, and on PC on 19 March 2026. In December 2023 Kojima Productions and the film company A24 announced a live-action Death Stranding film. “What we are creating is not just a direct translation of the game,” Kojima said.
Two more games are in development. Xbox is publishing OD. Physint, an espionage action game, was announced with Sony, but in mid-2026 PlayStation Studios dropped it. “After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to step away from collaborating with Kojima Productions on its project Physint,” it said. Kojima said the studio had “spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner”, and on 9 September 2026 Xbox announced that it would publish Physint. “This expands our relationship with Xbox beyond OD,” Kojima said.
Sources
- Edge issue 136, May 2004, pp. 59–63: “Kojima versus the big robots” (his age; the stories and the 8mm films; economics; the wedding speech; first job on the follow-up to Antarctic Adventure; Metal Gear Solid 3’s script; wanting to “become freelance”).
- Retro Gamer Collection volume 4 (2010), pp. 76–79: “In the chair with Hideo Kojima” (born in Tokyo in 1963; economics; friends and teachers; hoping for the arcade division and joining the MSX team; Lost World; the “lowest technology” team; Penguin Adventure as assistant director; Snatcher and its film influences; Policenauts; Kojima Productions formed in 2005).
- Retro Gamer issue 101, April 2012, pp. 41–45: Metal Gear series history (planner in the home computer division from 1986; the MSX2’s limits; the Famicom and NES version and its changes; Snake’s Revenge; Metal Gear 2 and its 2006 re-release; Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2).
- Retro Gamer issue 15, 2005, “MSX Appeal”: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990), its guards and its Japan-only release.
- The Games Machine issue 2, December 1987, p. 61: Metal Gear review (MSX cartridge, £20.95; “sneak” and “alarm” modes; the unknown author).
- Edge issue 54, January 1998: Metal Gear Solid feature and Kojima interview (the Famicom version; the MSX; the PlayStation rumours; the team’s first 3D game).
- Wireframe issue 2, November 2018, pp. 50–53: Hideo Kojima profile (Penguin Adventure; Snatcher on the PC-8801 in 1988; Zone of the Enders and the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo; Boktai’s light sensor; P.T. and Silent Hills with Guillermo del Toro; Peace Walker, 2010; Metal Gear Solid V, 2015, his last Konami game; the Death Stranding cast).
- Computer and Video Games issue 172, March 1996, p. 18: Snatcher on the Mega-CD and the untranslated Policenauts.
- 3DO Magazine issue 7, November/December 1995, p. 20: “Policenauts: The Next Generation of Snatcher”.
- Sega Retro, “Snatcher” and “Policenauts” (database, web, secondary): Snatcher on the PC-8801 and MSX2 in 1988 and the Mega-CD version for the West in 1994; Policenauts on the PC-9821 in 1994, then 3DO, PlayStation and Saturn. https://segaretro.org/Snatcher and https://segaretro.org/Policenauts
- Edge issue 151, July 2005, p. 37: KCET West restructured as Kojima Productions.
- Wireframe issue 10, March 2019, pp. 50–51: “Konami at 50” (Silent Hills cancelled and P.T. withdrawn in 2015).
- Patrick Klepek, “Geoff Keighley: Konami Barred Hideo Kojima From Accepting Metal Gear Award”, Kotaku, 3 December 2015 (web, secondary): transcript of Keighley’s statement. https://kotaku.com/geoff-keighley-konami-barred-hideo-kojima-from-accepti-1746111339
- Sony Interactive Entertainment, “Sony Computer Entertainment Enters into an Agreement with Kojima Productions”, 16 December 2015. https://sonyinteractive.com/en/press-releases/2015/sony-computer-entertainment-enters-into-an-agreement-with-kojima-productions/
- Wireframe issue 30, January 2020, pp. 56–57: Death Stranding review (Kojima Productions and Sony; the courier and the ghosts; the shared online world; 62%).
- Wikipedia, “Death Stranding” (web, secondary): release on 8 November 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Stranding
- Kojima Productions, “Death Stranding 2: On the Beach” product page: PlayStation 5 release on 26 June 2025, PC on 19 March 2026. https://www.kojimaproductions.jp/en/death-stranding-2
- Kojima Productions, “Kojima Productions and A24 team up to adapt Death Stranding”, December 2023, and Deadline, “‘Death Stranding’ Live-Action Feature In Works At A24”, December 2023 (web, secondary). https://www.kojimaproductions.jp/en/A24-announcement and https://deadline.com/2023/12/death-stranding-a24-live-action-feature-1235666897/
- Xbox Wire, “Xbox and Kojima Productions Expand Partnership to Publish Physint”, 9 September 2026: Physint and OD; Kojima’s statement. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/09/09/xbox-and-kojima-productions-expand-partnership-to-publish-physint/
- Diego Argüello, “Xbox replaces PlayStation as Physint publisher”, Game Developer, 10 September 2026 (web, secondary): PlayStation Studios’ statement and Kojima’s account of the search for a partner. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/xbox-to-publish-kojima-productions-physint-after-playstation-ditches-project