Hideo Kojima

Hideo Kojima was born in August 24, 1963 in Japan.  He is a video game designer at is currently employed as the head director at Kojima Productions, former VP of Konami Computer Entertainment Japan.  He has worked on many famous titles, such as Metal Gear Solid, which is a strategy based game.  He has been consistently named a influential and innovative game designer by experts and fans.  He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2008 MTV Game Awards and was also honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2009 Game Developers Conference.  As a child, he had to deal with death and gang violence consistently, since he father was a member of a Japanese gang. 

As a child he dreamed to be an artist, but he was discouraged because of the society’s norms, also his father was a artist and he suffered from great finical debt.  When he wanted to write short stories, he is reported having writing stories that were as long as a thousand pages long, but magazines who’ll publish his stories were only looking for 100 page long stories.  In 1998, he became the producer of Metal Gear Solid; only two other Metal Gear games were made before him.  From 1998 to 2010, he has produced 26 Metal Gear games (consoles, computers, and even mobile games).  He produced other games such as Snatchers and Zone in the Enders, though they were not popular enough to make it overseas like Metal Gear Solid was.  He was even asked to work on a Castlevania game.  He even worked on a Super Mario Smash Brothers to add Snake into the game, he has even produced some dramas, giving movies a huge credit of his success, and he was very influenced by them.  He has also done some voice acting and starred in some movies, including producing some movies also.

I like Hideo Kojima’s games because they involve strategy and sneaking around, providing you with a chilly scared feeling when you are playing, especially Metal Gear.  You are a prison escapee and you must sneak around an enemy base trying to find a way out and destroy a machine called Metal Gear.  This is his most popular work and it has been popular enough to go worldwide.  His other works with Castlevania and Snatcher, Snatcher being an investigation game where you go and question people, look up evidence, and acquiring vital information to solve the mystery.  Snatcher was Hideo Kojima’s second video game created; it was also popular enough to get a sequel. 

Storytelling is very difficult. But adding the flavour helps to relay the storytelling, meaning in a cut scene, with a set camera and effects, you can make the users feel sorrow, or make them happy or laugh. This is an easy approach, which we have been doing. That is one point, the second point is that if I make multiple storylines and allow the users to select which story, this might really sacrifice the deep emotion the user might feel.  That quote talks about his mentality as a game designer.

http://unrealitymag.com/index.php/2009/07/10/metal-gear-solid-the-childrens-book/