For the first 58 years of his life, Hideo Kojima did not think about the fact that one day, he will die. As a boy, growing up in Japan in the 1960s, time seemed still. Even after he turned 30 and created Metal Gear Solid —the 1998 PlayStation classic that pioneered cinematic storytelling in games—he remembers thinking his next three decades would feel just as long as the first three. Instead, they went in a flash. Then, in 2020, isolated during Covid as he neared 60, he fell seriously ill. “I thought that I could never recover,” he says. “I felt like I might not ever be able to create a game again.”

It was the first time he’d ever thought about his lifespan; that there were things he would never get to make. Games, sure, but also films, and perhaps other things entirely. “I had all t

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