Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
I started thinking about my own stories when I was little.
Ever since I was a child, I was a daydreamer.
I would nearly get run over.
I guess that's just the kind of person I am.
Please join me in welcoming...
- Mr. Hideo Kojima. - Hideo Kojima.
One of the most creative talents in the history of gaming.
Fantastic.
What he creates are not games or films...
They are his worlds.
In the space of gaming, he is the master.
- Absolutely love your work. - Thank you.
You can tell it's a Hideo Kojima game
even if that credit wasn't there.
No way.
Video games are the biggest, most powerful form
of entertainment in the world
and the numbers clearly show that
more than three billion people on the planet play video games.
And Hideo really is probably the most well-known game creator
in the world.
It's kind of like stepping into Willy Wonka's chocolate factory
with Willy Wonka, you know?
You just kind of go along for the ride.
I think that it's the obligation of any artist
to push the boundaries of their canvas.
There isn't some kind of thread from which I pull ideas...
Fragments of ideas appear in my head.
I have these moments in my game-making.
I'm really interested in how people think creatively,
no matter what the discipline.
Any form of artistry, the process is the same almost always.
And that is an interplay between the intellect and the intuition.
He's fighting all the time.
I don't know with whom.
Maybe himself.
If it says "A Hideo Kojima Game",
it means that from start to finish,
I'm involved in everything, that's the declaration.
"A Hideo Kojima Game" means we cannot cut corners.
It's hard work every time, but this time, I was independent.
In my previous company, I was free to do what I wanted, but it wasn't my own brand.
I had my own games
but I had to protect the company's brand
and profits.
In such an environment,
it is very difficult to create something cutting-edge.
The only way is to produce it yourself.
The story from back in the day was that
Hideo wanted to go and pitch a game
but he didn't want to tell anyone what it was.
He really wanted someone to sign up for the game
without hearing what the game was.
And everyone in the Western world was like, "You're crazy."
We know you're Hideo Kojima
but we're not going to sign up your game until we know what you're making.
That's the Sony HQ.
And Sony, as far as I know, basically said,
"We're going to bet on you, Hideo Kojima, as a creator."
We don't even need to know what the game is.
We're just in.
It's bent right? Like this.
Yeah, that looks bad, it should come up like this.
This is a bit long.
Maybe it doesn't look good.
The first game I did with Director Kojima was Policenauts.
And...
Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
He told me at the start that he wanted a new challenge.
With games nowadays,
you're competing against players around the world to see who's the best.
You hit or shoot each other
or you might co-operate with others to shoot an enemy.
This game isn't like this, it's about connections.
You help others you can't see and that will bring you closer.
It's a unique game characteristic.
When I first explained this to my staff,
I got a largely negative response.
They said, "But no one does that..."
"You have to be the strongest, you play because you want to stand out."
"You don't do something for others." Most of them were negative about it.
When Director Kojima first told me about his plan,
he said that the game would be based around "delivery".
Something with a totally new concept of gameplay.
I wondered if it would be accepted.
We started planning at the end of 2015.
At the time, there was a lot of fragmentation and isolation.
It was a time when the world was becoming divided.
Although the world is connected by the Internet 24 hours a day,
it wasn't coming together as one.
I wanted to offer another way,
which is why I made Death Stranding.
He is not someone that just sort of rinses and repeats.
He really tries to, to reinvent how the game is played.
But overarching all that is this view
that he wants to communicate something to the player.
He really has a message that he wants to deliver in every game
that he hopes translates to the player.
Like every game he makes, there's a reason behind making the game.
Firstly, they take on the role of Sam.
At the very start, they will feel a sense of being completely alone
on a very dangerous path.
They feel a sense of loneliness
as they deliver packages and start connecting the world.
The player is the only one making the connections,
so the sense of loneliness is torturous at the start.
Hello!
Hey you!
I'm Sam.
Hey, my name is Sam too!
They begin to realize
that there are others around the world doing the same thing as them.
Those are the other players, the other Sams.
Thanks for the help.
They can't see each other but they start to see traces and realize,
"I'm not the only one who felt this way".
And it opens out from there.
The people she left behind have been hard at work,
setting up Chiral network terminals.
But these terminals are still isolated.
We need you to bring them online.
There are invisible ghosts there,
he can sense them but not see them.
Mr. Kojima always keeps some space for the players to think for themselves.
These people have allergic reactions to the ghosts,
that's why they get tearful or get goosebumps.
I believe there's a moment of awakening that we get from any good work,
I think all of Mr. Kojima's works are like that.
When I was a student, there was a lot going on
and I didn't get along with my school.
I never told my parents about these things.
When I was with my class or my friends, I would be cheerful and outgoing.
I am from Kansai so I like to make people laugh or tease others.
But when I was alone,
I would hold my knees and listen to music and cry.
After my dad passed away, everyone was worried about me.
There was a period of feeling totally isolated and lonely.
The truth is that because my dad died, I was able to get into the game industry.
Games weren't acceptable like they are now.
Game centers were seen as a shady business in those days.
The industry had a negative image.
My mother was the only one who didn't object for some reason.
"If you want to pursue it, that's fine."
My friends and relatives thought my future was down the pan.
That's how I was seen.
If my dad was alive, he'd have been opposed.
He was a very scary man.
When I entered the industry,
I was surprised to find so many people like me.
For the first time,
there were people with a burning passion for making things.
I was having so much fun that I hardly slept at all.
I want to create things that people haven't seen before,
but it can be difficult.
If you say, it's a cross between Robocop and Towering Inferno,
then one can combine the two existing visuals together.
But if you say, "It's visually different from anything that exists",
they can't visualize it.
I don't know, like, new franchises right now.
I think that it's both, it's really brave and it's really hard.
They're mostly making, like, weird remakes and stuff.
It's, like, really hard to get funding for, like, new work in the modern era.
In the past, when I went pro,
they would just give you 100 million yen,
and you could make whatever you wanted.
But now it costs a few trillion, or tens of trillions of yen,
so if it's a failure, there's a huge risk to the business.
So they try to minimize this risk from all angles
to an extent which is much more than what it was in the past.
When you balance the commerciality expectation
of hundreds of millions of dollars in investment.
At the same time, wanting to stay true not just to your vision,
but to your whole idea of what gaming is.
That's like playing Russian roulette with six bullets.
How can we do it?
For the daily one, not this movement, but...
More like this?
He's trying to make a new narrative experience.
I can imagine the path he takes to achieve this
is very difficult.
I've been making games for over 30 years.
Before, if I was to make a flop, my staff could just go to another department.
They would still have a paycheck.
But now it's my own company...
so if I mess up, there won't be a next project.
Crashed.
He does more work than is required.
If you're just playing,
you perhaps wouldn't even notice how much information is packed in.
It's a whole world that he creates in his work, a virtual world.
In these virtual worlds, he thinks of every single element.
I work as closely as possible to my staff
and make detailed adjustments every day.
Uh...
But I don't think this way of working is common these days.
- Hello everyone. - Hello.
When the camera is rolling, the atmosphere is suddenly positive here.
Let's start with the bugs.
In the Beta version,
we couldn't include two corrections regarding the memory,
but we will try them.
So if it doesn't work, we'll think of something else.
From next week, I'd like to start the checks.
I was speaking with Shinkawa about this a minute ago.
On one side of the motorway where there's the construction work,
there is a round protrusion.
I'd like you to put a round one on the other side too.
If it's only on one side, the car cannot rotate.
Normally, you have different people focusing on story
or gameplay in other studios,
but I do it on my own, so I do them all in parallel.
This is probably only possible within my own studio.
Is this also blue, what color should it be, green?
Different color...
The route is indistinctive and hard to find.
In the collaborative arts or virtually all arts,
there's usually one voice ultimately.
The person who is that driving force has to do one very important thing
and that is create the strategies with which everybody else can work.
If I do this, it will react with "Beep."
Yes, it will go.
Around here.
It's like this, it's not like this.
Yeah, we'll try.
Let's have a look again.
There's a kind of a Darwinian battle that goes on in your mind,
and the strongest ideas survive.
They keep coming back to you they won't let you go
until you become a little bit obsessed with them.
And you go from a very divergent, broad view of the work,
and you bounce down into a very, very highly focused,
granular level of the work.
And it's bouncing between the two.
You can't see this bit properly here.
You're right, it's hard to see...
We need to make it visible at this bit too.
The extent that they can articulate that
and convey it to the others and inspire others working with them.
Then the work will be a comprehensive whole.
Being across every single aspect is incredible to me,
like, that's, that takes something that I don't have.
Very, very special.
I don't know when he sleeps.
I don't know if and when Hideo ever sleeps.
You can do this with double jumps.
Like he's flying.
With the Speed Skeleton, he's already jumping quite high.
He can do it!
The reason the bike can't jump is because it gets stuck on the rocks.
So there are many cases where it prevents the bike from speeding up and jumping.
When making a game, you have programming, art, storytelling,
sound, interactivity, and so on.
There are many different fields to think about.
You have to manage an awfully complicated mechanism.
Each minute, every day, we're faced with problems.
So we constantly have to make snap decisions.
If it's more than ten meters and enough to kill you,
can we make it red like the river bed?
I have on average 200 problems at once to do with details of the game,
and it's up to me to make decisions on all of them.
So the ones I'm unable to resolve stay in my head.
They're on my mind even when I leave the office.
Sometimes I do bug checks in my dreams.
People may be in charge of processing the call or engine
and character construction, rigging, whatever.
But the only person in charge of the orchestra
conducting for the emotion and the result is the auteur.
Lots of the directors I like are indie,
arthouse filmmakers, however,
for me, we also have to appeal to a mass audience.
I like film directors such as David Lynch and Cronenberg.
Keeping things edgy, but still appealing to mass audiences.
They're the games I want to create.
Put simply, I think Mr. Kojima's a bit obsessed with films.
It's obvious from his games.
There are a number of this kind of directors in our generation.
They love films and watch loads of films.
I think Mr. Kojima is definitely like that too.
For me, films are the sun.
It's like plant photosynthesis with sunbeams.
I want to receive its beams to stimulate my cells
and to inspire new creations.
Things that leave a deep impression on me, like Kubrick,
are innovative or new things.
They can split opinion.
But ultimately, it's precisely these things that stay with you.
So the part that we're doing today is Sam reaches west.
I first heard of Hideo through Guillermo del Toro.
So Guillermo called me and said, "Hey, there's this guy.
He's going to call you. Just say, 'Yes'."
And I was like, "What are you talking about?"
And he's like, "Just whatever he says, say 'Yes'."
I knew that we were going to be stepping
into a big world with big characters.
Giving us a package to say to them, like, "Hey, this package is from Fragile."
And so many times, I had to stop and go, "Hold on a second, hold on a second."
"So, what you're saying is..."
and it would be whether it's about the story, about the character,
about the breadth and immensity of the design, um...
how it was going to relate to the player
and how those players were going to relate to each other.
The story and the experiences just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
There's so many moments that I've had with him where I'm like, "What?
Like, what are you talking about?"
And then at some point, she's kind of warped in front of you, okay?
Like, being, like...
Makes sense now, man.
Make so much sense.
It was confusing for a lot of us
because the story is so intricate and it's so deep.
It was very confusing but what was done in such a great way is,
I was felt like I was sort of drip-fed,
whatever my brain could handle at that moment in time.
Captain,
I need you to hand him over.
Shoot him, John.
Let him go.
Please.
Shoot him!
I gave you an order. Shoot him.
Okay, cut.
- Guys on Monday... - I wanna, bye.
Trust in this medium is key.
It is the bedrock foundation for many reasons.
Number one, everything is in an abstraction.
Everything is vague.
- Good, Mark. Take three. - All right.
There's just four white walls with a bunch of cameras.
Right, we're all set.
Ready? Action.
Oh, Sam Bridges.
So trust is at the root of it all.
So...
Fragile...
Like the world and everything in it.
Me? I'm...
I'm no exception.
Let's not forget little old you.
I know it ain't easy wearing a mask all the time.
But now the mask can come off, right?
The more he would tell me, the more I would understand.
And you have to understand, I started making this game
not knowing anything about what anybody's talking about.
So as the trust got deeper and stronger,
the storyline got more revealed to me in a way that I could understand it.
And I knew we were doing something really special. You know?
We want the player, same flashback...
Every time we think we have an idea of what this is about,
it's just another layer and another layer.
Except me. I see you, and I talk to you.
And I tell you that you must...
Just point me, just tell me...
Yeah.
- And I'm like...
When you throw that away and lose your fear,
all of a sudden, there's a certain freedom in working like this.
You can just look at him and look at what he's creating over there in the corner.
You say, "You know what? I think I'm in good hands."
Let's just do it.
Stay back.
The Bridges members are looking for Sam,
but he's hard to find.
Fragile, BB, Deadman and everyone will work together to find him.
It's, uh, complex and very deep.
That's the voice capture we're doing.
It's almost a political statement.
Okay.
Okay, rolling.
You ready, Fragile?
Ready.
Sam.
- I see him. - Mm.
Is that one okay?
Yes, good.
And just make that "Sam"
a little quicker. It's like, "There he is."
Okay.
You love her, right?
You love her.
There it is.
People like Mads and Léa
have been in art-house, independent movies,
but they're also
in Hollywood movies.
We're pulling out.
They were the kind of people that I wanted to work with.
Secure the area.
Okay, cut there.
I wanted to do something with them that probed slightly deeper.
Okay, back down at that original volume for open fire.
- Everybody ready? - Got you. Yes.
Okay, here we go. Rolling when you are ready, sir.
Open fire.
It feels quite open.
And he's very pleased, obviously,
because whatever we do, that's not the end result.
He just, he needs us to do the base.
Disengage!
Time to go, boys.
And the more we can give him real emotions or whatever in that base,
the happier he gets.
Don't let me down, boys.
He's famous for being a storyteller in his games.
It's mayhem with the assassin's war.
But there's a certain beauty, a certain poetry to the entire image.
And I think that's also one of the keys to why his games are so incredibly popular
because they have both sides of the coin.
It was interesting because it's a world that I didn't know,
the world of video games.
Okay, same kind of thing here, right?
He brings you something you've always... you've been waiting for.
How did you get this?
I don't know what to say, except thanks.
It's also a way video games... it's a way of reaching people.
Except thanks.
- I was thinking playing before back. - Yeah.
I think it should be... it should be in a smile, no?
Yeah, it should have a smile on it.
And, "How did you get this?" is like,
you've been trying for weeks and weeks to get this
and here he strolls up and gives it to you, you know.
Okay.
How did you get this?
I don't know what to say, except thanks.
Good, good. Good, good, good.
Thank you.
I think we got it, thumbs up.
- Okay. - Okay.
- Good.
That's a wrap. You can come on out.
Popular games today have a Hollywood feel.
Action, gunfights, violence.
It's all fast-paced action.
Most games look so similar,
you can't even tell their title from looking at a scene.
The newer it is, the more they fear it.
Being original is hard.
So most rely on an algorithm,
which is the enemy of creativity.
And I see Hideo as the enemy of the algorithm.
What I think is unique, is his sense of pacing,
his sense of drama.
I admire it.
It can go in detours
that the Western discipline of storytelling would not go to,
and therefore, it makes it very impactful.
I think Hideo Kojima is a very strange man.
I think he likes,
he likes to tell stories in a way that is bizarre.
That is not usual.
It's in the uncanny valley between, like, comedy
and, like, extreme earnestness.
Like, I just really can't tell if it's a joke or not.
I'm just like, is he freaking serious right now?
Like, is this real?
And it's, like, profoundly funny, but also, like, deeply sad.
Before Hideo Kojima made Metal Gear,
everything was about engaging, about combat.
He turned it around and it was now about avoiding combat.
It was about hide and seek, and stealth gameplay became a thing.
Going back a bit, in 1986 when I started my career,
there were lots of war games.
Making war games felt uncomfortable
as my parents had experienced war.
I heard all kinds of stories about air raids and real-life experiences.
I didn't want to portray combat as heroism.
There was no questioning why there was a war,
or who is fighting whom.
I didn't like it very much,
so that's why I tried putting in the anti-war,
anti-nuclear themes into my games.
It was a thoughtful approach to playing games
and that really burst, you know, the stealth genre
which today is still used in so many games.
My home was close to the sea,
and it left a very strong impressionon me.
The smell of the sea and looking at views
over the sea remind me of the past.
Those days, the environment was so perfect.
Then I moved to a bigger city, Osaka,
and that was a drastic change.
Both my parents worked.
Children of such a family would be given the house keys
as there was nobody home after school.
At that time, such children were called "Kagikko".
When I opened the door,
the first thing I did was turn all the lights on as I was scared.
It became a habit which I still have.
It was very lonely.
I'd think up stories because I had so much time alone.
At the moment, if you're discovered by one, five come out.
Yes.
Separate them out a bit, create a time lag.
Will do.
We just had eight come out.
When you get out of here, you are safe.
- Should we make him like this or this?
Like he's coming out.
Like a zombie.
I want him to come out looking around, as if to say, "See if you can get me..."
Let me put the actions in place.
I think one of the big qualities of his work
is that it references other forms of art constantly.
It's not video games that talk about video games.
My generation didn't have video games when we were kids.
We had other entertainment like movies and books
and we put what we absorbed from them into games.
Who is a fan of Van Gogh? Raise your hands.
- No one.
This film, Loving Vincent was released all over the world last year.
When you are creating things, you need references from other genres.
Such a crazy film.
I believe since Mr. Kojima was a child,
he watched many films, read a lot of books and listened to a lot of music
and was exposed to the arts.
So naturally, he's continued this into adulthood when making his own work
and, of course, what he absorbed would be reflected in his work.
Mr. Kojima is an avid reader.
He reads all sorts of novels and publications.
And those many stories have been absorbed into him.
And from that, a new world is born.
I was an ordinary child. I was totally hooked on books.
On the way back home from prep school, that's when I started going to a bookshop.
When I dropped by, I saw the owner on his own, watching me.
The atmosphere was such that I felt I couldn't leave unless I bought a book.
Every time our eyes met, I thought I had to buy something,
and that, for me, was a science fiction book.
BOOKSTORE, HOUSEWIFE'S FRIEND
As I reflect on that time, maybe it was my escape from reality.
I felt quite constrained within myself,
but science fiction releases you from the mundane.
Instead of just going to school every day and doing the same thing,
suddenly a meteorite comes crashing down,
or there is a viral outbreak or an alien invasion.
You're in a world where you think the world is going to end.
If you're in that fantasy world, it's like you can let go of the stress.
It was an era when ordinary people didn't experience foreign cultures or the world.
As a child, I learnt about the world through books.
In 1970, the Osaka World Expo was held.
Many people from abroad came to Japan.
For the first time, I saw people from different countries.
Cutting-edge technology was there,
such as a videophone, an enormous one.
And a moving walkway,
the ones we take for granted today when we go to an airport.
There were also symbols of each country's ancient culture on display
and they made a huge impact on me.
"Progress and Harmony for mankind" was the catchphrase.
There was a vision of the future where technology would make us happy.
That would be the 21st Century.
It was like I saw the future.
Diverse cultures and customs combined
with cutting-edge science to form a future.
I could see the concept very clearly.
Technology would connect the world.
That had such a huge impact on me,
you could create such an amazing world.
"Dear Kojima Productions..."
"The Death Stranding Gold Master disc has been approved!"
I'm really happy on release day.
If I confess, at that point, my thoughts have already turned to the next idea.
The launch is a chance for me to switch to the next project.
It's important to be able to do this.
It's been around three years, nine months
and for those who joined us later, for all of you,
thank you so much for your hard work.
We've taken a first step, a giant leap in the entertainment industry.
I'm involved in a project for a long time
so I'm very happy to finally have the opportunity
to launch it.
Welcome to Countdown to Death Stranding.
We are here in New York City.
The World Strand Tour has touched down here
for an incredible experience
and I'm honored to be joined by Hideo Kojima
on the day that Death Stranding is launching around the world.
I remember there was a lot of tension when, you know,
during the development of the game, because everyone kept saying, well,
"Where are the guns? Where's the fights?"
And Hideo is like, "No. It's about something different.
It's about just walking and experiencing this world."
And that's such a challenging idea.
You can't give the audience what they want all the time.
You also have to make them understand
that sometimes they want something they don't know.
The risk is that people just don't accept it.
It's too radical in some way.
But of course, the upside is that you change,
the medium that you're working in and that's why
his work is so important.
Outside of AAA games,
I think people often try and communicate on a deeper level in gaming
but that was the first time I'd ever seen a game of that scale
trying to go in a lot deeper than what games would usually attempt.
He's created something completely original.
It's impossible to achieve that with every game.
You are able to tangibly feel the world he has created.
The imaginary world.
When you play Death Stranding,
the dynamics are exactly the opposite of every other video game.
You are taught virtues that seem impossible in gaming.
Patience, empathy, solidarity.
It's the only game I've played where I thought I was a better person
at the end of the game ever.
I just love when, like, really complex things are really popular,
because it makes me feel like,
mainstream audiences are, like, open to, like, weird experimental art.
And that's always, like,
I don't know, a thing that can give you faith in humanity, I suppose.
The function of art, and philosophy, and humanity is
if you want to call them something, is to enhance the human spirit.
That's the function.
And video gaming is an art.
At its best is an art.
That's where art has its meaning.
It's not meant to please you, necessarily.
It's meant to inspire you.
It's meant to provoke you.
It's meant to entertain you.
Death Stranding has all those components in it.
It's all there, but it has so much more.
Three months after Death Stranding was released,
the world in the game became a reality with Covid.
People played the game during lockdown while they were isolated from others.
I was pleased to receive messages from people who felt the game saved them
because the game indirectly connected them to others.
That was my motivation for creating things in the first place.
Tentacles just went out
trying to find ways to connect with people.
And there was something that games could do
that no show, no movie could do.
Not as effectively.
It's one of the things that I love about this art form,
is that you and I could go in and look at a painting together
and we can have a conversation.
But there's a difference between you and I picking up a paintbrush together
and painting something together.
And that, to me, is what games allow us to do.
And that's especially what Death Stranding at that time allowed us to do.
When art is strong enough, it's prophetic.
This was a COVID game before COVID.
Uh, this was...
a game that I think responded to that shift
that the pandemic brought before it occurred.
I've always thought this was curious in all the games we've released,
the world follows the scenarios the director has written.
I think he's half prophet.
It's scary. I don't want to think about it.
My ideas come and go, overwriting each other.
But one thing that troubles me is that I turn 59 this year.
I'm wondering how many I'll have time to make.
Uh...
That sense of fear has come over me just recently, I haven't had it before.
There's no cultural evolution, unless it is renewed.
That's the history of all creative.
It constantly has to be refreshed.
And that's where the creative courage comes in.
If we lose that singular vision, we lose part of our humanity.
And if you are 100 percent true to yourself as an artist,
then your heart and soul will always beat for the future.
All games are sort of, like, distilling
the most interesting things around you
into a narrative and that's basically what storytelling is or movies are
or books are.
So it's interesting to see games kind of, like,
enter the pantheon of storytelling in this way.
Games are stories.
The purpose of stories is to make meaning out of life.
It's fundamental to us.
It's the only way we can explain the world and our existence.
My ambitions expand as more things become possible.
There's an effect of what's in my head expanding like this
and that's precisely why entertainment in this technology zone is so compulsive.
It's limitless and you never get bored of it.
It's irresistible fun.