He talked a lot during those years, and everything he said seemed only to confuse the picture. Following the Death Stranding hype cycle was a bit gamelike in itself, as fans were forced to construct some mental image of the game out of Kojima’s sporadic hints. Over the next three years, Kojima continued to be maddeningly obscure in teasing the game. The bizarre trailer was perfectly calibrated to stoke that curiosity while leaving it maddeningly unfulfilled. Given the idiosyncrasies of his previous creations, the audience could only wonder at what he might do with so much freedom. He had started an independent studio and signed a contract with Sony Interactive Entertainment that would give him greater creative freedom to develop this new game. Now, as everyone in the audience knew, Kojima was on his own after a spectacular breakup with Konami. Nevertheless, they became one of the most successful franchises of all time.
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The games of that series brazenly rejected the seamless fun typically associated with the medium, preferring instead to trawl choppier aesthetic waters. For decades he expressed those ideas as a developer with the Japanese game giant Konami, creating and shepherding its Metal Gear Solid series. Over his 30 years in the industry, he has come to exert the sort of reality-distorting effect on gamers that Steve Jobs did on electronics consumers, with an almost supernatural ability to persuade people to get onboard with ideas that would seem totally preposterous coming from anyone else. Kojima is one of a very few video-game developers who can generate enormous anticipation for a game based on his name alone. The reaction might not have been much different if he had shown a blank screen. It was more like something you’d see at MoMA than at E3. It was all mood and symbol and Norman Reedus’s shiny posterior. There was no hint as to the story, the gameplay or even the genre of the game. Norman Reedus from “The Walking Dead”? And he was weeping hysterically? The man rose to his hands and knees and crawled over to the baby and picked it up and cradled it in his hands, bringing it to his chest, and his face was revealed and it was. A black cord connected the man to what appeared to be a tiny infant, lying next to him on the sand. The handprints led to a naked man lying on the beach, his left wrist locked in glowing handcuffs. Handprints appeared in the sand and then filled up, inexplicably, with black goop. The camera floated over the sand, revealing a jumble of dead crabs. The video opened with a William Blake poem, the first lines of “Auguries of Innocence,” then cut to a close-up of highly realistic computer-generated sand.
Keep in mind that this is a venue where cybernetic dinosaurs and giant-felling samurai are par for the course. Kojima proceeded to play perhaps the strangest three and a half minutes of video ever to grace the E3 stage. Then he stood at center stage, beaming, to deafening applause. The floor began to light up underneath him, panes of light flying in from left and right to create a sort of light bridge, which he bounded down to shake a Sony executive’s hand. A live orchestra struck up a blaring John Williams-style score as the curtain lifted to reveal a sloping stage, at the very top of which stood Kojima, a slight Japanese man with swooping black hair and glasses. The event was what the industry calls a press conference, but this particular spectacle more closely resembled the scene in “King Kong” when the beast is displayed to the public in a Broadway theater. Death Stranding, the newest video game from the developer Hideo Kojima, was introduced to the world in the summer of 2016 on a stage at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the gaming industry’s annual trade-show extravaganza.