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. A flash and they went. 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 these ideas,” he says. "So I wrote them

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