One of Japan’s biggest gaming media outlets, Dengeki, had an interview with Hideo Kojima sometime after he had shown a new trailer for Death Stranding at The Game Awards 2017, which has been published at the last Dengeki PlayStation magazine issue in 2017 this week. In this interview, Kojima explains how he established the new Kojima Productions and started working on Death Stranding, as well as explaining why the studio went silent for most of 2017.
We have made a full translation of this interview, which you can read below.
Dengeki: Please tell us how you looked back at your work and activities in 2017.
Kojima: Kojima Productions was established on December 16, 2015, but this was just registering the company, and there were only 4 members including myself. The next year from January I traveled around the world, beginning to search for technologies starting from game engines, and at the same time, I also started constructing the company organization. Interviewing [people] to gather members, finding an office, designing the institution, and more are all done at the same time in parallel. Of course, while we?re doing that we also made the game design and scenario for Death Stranding, as well as doing various experiments. In June 2016 we showed the very first teaser at E3, and in December 2016 we released the second teaser. And we also decided to pick DECIMA as the game engine, so we also worked to improve it among others.
We ran through 2016 like that, but 2017 was a...