Hideo Kojima is one of the most recognizable names in gaming as the Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding 2 director has not only been loudly at the forefront of all of his game’s marketing campaigns, but he’s even brushed shoulders with Hollywood celebrities again and again throughout the decades, in particular with his upcoming horror thing (?) OD.
Francois Coulon, the director behind the original 2002 Splinter Cell, claims that Hideo Kojima’s auteur status veering on celebrity status is much-deserved, though. “It is hard for me to measure the impact of Mr. Kojima alone vs Kojima and his team but, to be honest, it is not important,” Coulon said while speaking in the most recent issue of Retro Gamer magazine. “A creative lead in this industry is someone who can convey his vision to other team members so that they can also bring something to the creative table. I don’t know how Mr Kojima is managing his teams but the result speaks for itself.”
Kojima’s lengthy career stretches back to the 1980s where he first served as a director, designer, and writer on cyberpunky visual novel Snatcher, as well as the first isometric Metal Gear games. But his breakout success, the game that catapulted his name into auteur territory, was the stealth-laden Metal Gear Solid with all its anti-war messaging and ambitiously-framed, sometimes overindulgent cutscenes that have since become emblematic of Kojima’s games.
Although as modern blockbuster games become bigger and bigger, with sometimes thousands of developers working on a single project, the idea of an auteur becomes more controversial. It’s easy to attribute an indie game‘s success to its solo-developer, but when hundreds of developer’s fingerprints are etched into Death Stranding 2, is it still okay to label Kojima as the author? The creator? To heap all the praise onto his lap? Coulon certainly thinks Kojima can be thought of as the main architect, but it all raises some interesting questions, I think.
