“I will play video games as long as I have the strength”

He said this when he was 58 years old. It was 2021, and with a sly smile, he boasted that he was the same age as Brad Pitt and a year younger than Tom Cruise.

Because Hideo Kojima is from a man who claims that his body is 70% cinema, one cannot help but expect a cinematic reference. Today, as he turns 60 (which is August 24, 2023), there are no cinematic references. Just a photo of a simple cake and a lone photo of him holding a rose posted by Ayako, his personal assistant..

“My body is failing me” he said two years ago “but I will continue to play games as long as I live”almost like a warning. Awareness of time, which even for him flows inexorably, but he cannot hide the indefatigable willpower, the creation of video games is what he loves and what he intends to continue to do.

An intention that Hideo Kojima wanted to make clear – as if there was some additional need – between the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016, when, just after his “divorce” from Konami, he founded his new Kojima Productions. His idea is here on his studio’s vision page: “The game is not just entertainment, it is the original basis of imagination and creativity”. Let’s face it: those who play (homo ludens) are also those who create (Homo Faber)”.

A thought borrowed from Johan Huizinga, the one written on the site, but which Kojima made his own and poured – perhaps too literally – into his Death Stranding, the first child after marrying Konami. Sam, who is the avatar for us, who are both Homo Ludens playing delivery and at the same time Homo Faber rebuilding the USA one ladder and one rope at a time. Well, there – as in all previous works – there is a typical smell of cinema. Hollywood nods and homages have never been devoid of Kojima’s stylistic signature since Metal Gear (1987).

Now we are looking to the future. In studios and offices in Tokyo, we are working on Death Stranding 2 and an unspecified project in collaboration with Microsoft. Good Koji also saw fit to make hoodies in different colors depending on the attendees: blue if Jim Ryan is coming from PlayStation, green if Phil Spencer from Xbox is coming (who spares no praising for us). Meanwhile, the smell of the film is getting stronger, given that its intellectual property will be the basis for a film created by Hammerstone and A24, the same studio that made a splash at the 2023 Oscars.

And now, quite recently, an almost impossible dream: space, the last frontier.