Kojima has a mind tomb: a USB stick filled with ideas for his staff to use after he dies ‘kind of like a will’
As a 31 year old, I think constantly about my imminent death. After being assassinated by terrorists while rescuing a baby who is also the president from a burning building, how do I want people to remember me?
Fortunately, my contract stipulates that I will be embalmed and lie in state like Lenin in the centre of the PC Gamer offices until the end of time, but others don’t have that luxury (we’re short on desk space as it is). Hideo Kojima, for instance, is achieving immortality by cramming a USB stick full of ideas for his staff to use after he concludes his tenancy on Earth.
In a chat with our comrades at Edge magazine, Kojima said a serious illness during the Covid-19 pandemic reminded him of his mortality: “Until then, I didn’t think I was old, you know? I just didn’t feel my age, and I assumed I would be able to create for as long as I live.” Sickness disillusioned him of that. “I couldn’t create anything. And I saw lots of people around me passing away at that time. I was confronted with death.”
Though Kojima recovered and is now full-swing on putting out Death Stranding 2, the experience stayed with him. He began to wonder how long he had left to keep doing creative work—”Perhaps I would have 10 years?”
It’s that confrontation with mortality, says Kojima, that produced the pitch for Physint, but it produced something else, too: a USB stick filled with Kojima-brand ideas for his staff to pore through after he’s gone. “I gave a USB stick with all my ideas on it to my personal assistant,” said the man himself, “kind of like a will.
“Perhaps they could continue to make things after I’m gone, here at Kojima Productions… This is a fear for me—what happens to Kojima Productions after I’m gone. I don’t want them to just manage our existing IP.”
To be honest, I can’t think of anything more Kojima than games still coming out with his name over the title sometime in 2150. If anyone deserves this kind of intellectual preservation, it’s the guy who got a Game Boy Advance game made with a solar sensor built into the cartridge. You reckon the idea for a game where you get old, die, and forget how to move is on there? Hopefully Kojima’s assistant backed it up, in any case.
