Hideo Kojima is considered a legendary developer by many gamers, but he faced a lot of headwinds in his early days.
Who is it about? The Japanese game developer Hideo Kojima spoke about, among other things, his beginnings in the gaming industry in a podcast on YouTube.
When Kojima started out in gaming, games with a deep story were a rarity – so he became a library regular and did a lot of research to change that.
If you want to get an idea of Kojima’s games, you can see the launch trailer for Death Stranding here:
Death Stranding – Launch Trailer
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What does Kojima say about story in games? Kojima says in the podcast that in its early days it was difficult to give games a story because everyone was against it. He himself was criticized for going to the library to do research:
There wasn’t much you could do back then. I wanted to go to the library to research things like plots. When I went there while working, people would say, “You don’t need to go to the library.” I asked why, and they told me, “Because games don’t need stories.”
However, that didn’t stop Kojima, he reports. Instead, he took the proverbial reins into his own hands: “So I paid for everything out of my own pocket, for example when I wanted to buy books. I read about 300 books to make a game.”
Kojima later says in the podcast that he generally had a difficult time starting out in the industry. He didn’t just want to make arcade games without a story that were just about shooting enemies or objects quickly.
Plus, no one in the company wanted to work with him because he was the new guy who had never developed a game before. However, that changed after an initial small success. After that he was the guy who did “weird stuff”. Such a “weird idea” from Kojima was ultimately rejected: developer legend Hideo Kojima once toyed with the idea of letting you fight a boss for 2 weeks