Hideo Kojima Shares Wild 'Forgetting Game' Idea Where Characters Lose Abilities As Real-World Time Passes
Speaking on episode 17 of his Japanese radio podcast KOJI10, Kojima spoke on how he used such time-related mechanics in past games, also revealing some intriguing unused concepts, including one scrapped from his upcoming sequel, Death Stranding 2: On The Beach . The End in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
Reflecting on his past experiences, Kojima brought up two examples seen in 2004's Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater . Firstly, food acquired in the game would start to go bad after a player leaves it in their inventory for a few real-world days, making the protagonist Snake sick if eaten. The second, notably more iconic example would be the boss fight with The End, an elderly sniper. This battle was made infamous when the game launched, as players soon figured out that they could use the system clock to easily beat the otherwise difficult boss, and that by waiting a full week and then loading their mid-battle save, a cutscene would play showing The End dying of old age.
For Death Stranding 2: On The Beach , Kojima revealed that he wanted to use a similar time system, albeit in a smaller scale, although plans were eventually scrapped during development. 'I've thought about having characters' hair grow in games. Originally in Death Stranding 2 , I was going to have Sam's beard gradually grow out over time, and the player would have to shave it. If they didn't, Sam would end up looking unkempt,' he explained. 'However, as Norman Reedus is a big star, I didn't want to make him look uncool!'
Still, the director has bold plans in store for potential projects, outlining a few game concepts which incorporate the passage of time as a major mechanic. First up, he mentions an idea of a game with a character that ages as time goes on. 'It starts out with the player being born, you're a child, and then gradually over time you become an adult. In the game, you fight various enemies. If you keep playing the game, you will become a 70 or 80-year-old man. However, at this age, you will be weaker, and your eyesight will worsen. When you are a teenager, you'll be able to run faster, but by the time you reach 60, you'll slow down a bit.' he described, outlining a game that sounds similar to 2021's Sifu but with real-time ageing, although he joked that no one would buy such a game.
His second idea, on the other hand, sounds much more intriguing as it flips the script, with Kojima proposing a 'forgetting game'. In this concept, the game's playable character will slowly start to forget important information or lose skills if players take too long a break in between play sessions, gradually forgetting 'how to fire their gun or what their job is'. This system would also eventually build up until a player is completely unable to move, essentially forcing a player to get through it as quickly as possible, or take extended time off to play it. As wild as this sounds, the concept would make for an interesting change of pace in today's age of bloated maps and copy-pasted ideas, and definitely falls in line with the director's wacky repertoire.
And who knows? Maybe Kojima would actually follow through and experiment with such mechanics in his future games, but in the meantime, Kojima fans can look forward to his next mind-bending adventure when Death Stranding 2: On The Beach releases on 26 June for the PS5.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise 'duds' like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3 . He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying. Death Stranding Hideo Kojima Metal Gear Solid
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Geek Culture
09-07-2025
- Geek Culture
Isolation & Inspiration: How The Pandemic Shaped ‘Death Stranding 2' For Hideo Kojima & Yoji Shinkawa
This interview has been edited for clarity. It's no secret that video game auteur Hideo Kojima ( Metal Gear franchise ) started work on a sequel to his hit game, Death Stranding (2019) before the pandemic began in 2020, but ultimately chose to adjust his narrative to reflect the impact that COVID-19 had around the world. After all, Kojima'-san's ability to make games that have an uncanny parallel to real-world events marks just one of the legendary game director and producer's talent in analysing trends in societal and political behaviour, and developing an intriguing narrative out of it, including the spread of misinformation, fake news and rise of artificial intelligence (AI) from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001). And what drove his decision was around the real-world isolation he felt during the global lockdown, itself a topic he wrote about and developed in the original game, not realising that his first game since his departure from leading Japanese developer and studio, Konami, about courier Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus) hired to deliver items and supplies to isolated colonies after a global catastrophe, and ultimately reconnecting these pockets of people via a wireless communications network, would draw real-world parallels just a few months later. So what better way to revisit the theme, now based on actual experiences, explained the legendary creative mind behind the new sequel, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach , during the Taipei stopover of the Death Stranding World Strand Tour 2 , where he was also joined by the game's art director Yoji Shinkawa. Photo credit: Kojima Productions. 'During the pandemic, I felt very lonely,' Kojima-san shared in an interview with Geek Cutlure. 'There was no one in the office, and all the staff were working remotely. I even got sick during this time.' These personal experiences of disconnection became a crucible for the game's narrative and design, as Kojima-san then described his haunting walks through empty streets, a surreal landscape that directly mirrored the game's post-apocalyptic world. 'Usually busy paths were completely deserted. Benches were sealed off, and there were hardly any people,' he recalled. 'It looked really like there was no one in the world.' These solitary walks helped Kojima-san establish an updated basis for Bridges, as the global events now mirrored the desolate world of Death Stranding 2 , and the pandemic's enforced social distancing and sense of disconnection became a key inspiration for the game's exploration of human connection and loneliness. Photo credit: Kojima Productions. 'We had almost like a martial law. People wouldn't be allowed by the government to walk outside during the pandemic,' he said, further sharing how the COVID-19 pandemic profoundly influenced the game's core themes of human connection and isolation, but also proving that even in the most challenging times, creativity can find its most powerful expression. And while the narrative plays a key role, there's also another aspect in video games that draw in players, namely game design, and design itself and that falls on Kojima-san's long-time collaborator, Yoji Shinkawa, to turn words into detailed visual creations in a Hideo Kojima game. And it's an intricate creative process for all involved notes Shinkawa-san, providing an example using the striking red Ghost Mechs. Its design was born from a fundamental artistic principle of creating something truly individualistic. The key concept of the character design emerged from a big coffin, which became the structural basis for the characters' unique form. Kojima-san's visual direction played a crucial role in shaping the characters' appearance, resulting in a design that feels almost ritualistic, and the red armour, in particular, creates a sense of destructive energy that sets the Ghost Mechs apart. Drawing further inspiration from unexpected sources, Shinkawa-san incorporated elements reminiscent of Kojima-san's alien designs, particularly in the characters' head, which was heavily inspired from H.R. Giger's works of the iconic Xenomorph from the Alien film franchise, now easily recognised around the world. This approach resulted in a visual style that is both alien and familiar, ritualistic, and yet dynamic. Photo credit: Kojima Productions. Having worked closely together with Kojima-san for over 30 years, since Policenauts in 1994, Shinkawa-san has a comfortable working relationship with the noted game creator, but he also recognises how impactful the journey has been and how he has Kojima-san to thank back when he joined Konami in the '90s, as 'otherwise there would be no Yoji Shinkawa here today.'. 'When I was in my senior year in university, I applied for a job at Konami, and during my second interview, I had to decide which division I wanted to go to.' reminisces Shinkawa-san. 'At the time, I kind of said yes to work on a zombie gun shooting arcade game because I wanted to work on 3D models,' and before anyone can raise a point, Kojima-san acknowledges with a laugh, 'Yes, it was a very crappy game.' Ultimately he didn't go that route, because Kojima-san approached him in the early '90s to ask if he would like to work on his new concept for Metal Gear Solid . At the time Kojima-san was already working on Policenauts , so he roped in Shinkawa-san to clean up all the robot designs, while concurrently starting on making a model for Metal Gear Rex, but not in the offices. 'I asked Yoji to kind of make a model of Metal Gear Rex at home,' recalls Kojima-san. 'He did it at home in 3D. So at that time, back in the '90s, there was no emails or digital communication, so I would call Yoji everyday at around 5pm to ask how he's doing, and how was the modeling coming along.' Thankfully, the duo's current approach to the game's design philosophy is broader, incorporating a sense of purpose with world building within the game. For example, Kojima-san notes, at a separate press conference in Taipei with selected media, that his favourite tool is the ring-shaped terminal worn by Sam in the sequel, instead of the handcuff-shaped terminal in the original that symbolises a kind of restraint. Since Sam is no longer part of the Bridges organisation, it would be strange for him to still wear handcuffs, which necessitated the creation of a ring-shaped accessory which is activated like a competition ornament. Each of the five main members of the headquarters uses a different finger to activate their ring, and players can observe these details in the game. For Shinkawa-san, his joy in design can be found in the little things, such as the small truck and the tricycle introduced in this game because when it comes to designing machines, he aims for those that could only exist in games, animation, or movies and . He pays special attention to how these machines interact with players and the environment, ensuring unique experiences not possible in reality. If anything, it's the reconnection that Kojima-san wants players to feel after spending time with the game, which is about reconnecting the world through delivery. 'The team prepared various gameplay options, from direct combat to stealth, hoping the game would help rekindle connections formed during the pandemic,' he explains. Now that the sequel has been released to critical acclaim, there is the question of what's next though with the recent health scare for Kojima-san that required an operation and an evaluation of his life's priorities, there has been a revised approach to his understanding of life and death, and the cycle of life. 'So from a living thing, everything started from nothing, and then light, and this kind of goes on and on if we look at a map of a space, like a universe. So from looking at a very macro point, it means that this circulation is nothing really, it's always evolving,' muses the 61-year-old and the father of two when asked about his thoughts on future generations. 'So (it's the) same as just human beings. If you look at human beings, (a) child is raised by adults, and then the adults pass on to the children, and that children become adults, pass on to their children. It's kind of similar, is what I think.' Yonk is a geek who is fortunate enough to have an equally geeky Star Wars fan for a wife, who owns a LEGO Millennium Falcon encased in a glass coffee table as their home's centre-piece.
Geek Culture
23-06-2025
- Geek Culture
Unboxing The 'Death Stranding 2: On the Beach' Collector's Edition!
At a time when the world was moving toward isolation, Death Stranding served as a poignant, if peculiar, study in human connections and bonds. The thematic exploration resonated with real-world concerns, with director Hideo Kojima sprucing up visual storytelling in a way that only he can, and its sequel, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach , looks set to be bigger and bolder than before. Set 11 months after the events of the first, the highly anticipated title continues the journey of Sam Porter Bridges across the Australian continent, as the freelance porter connects isolated survivors and colonies to the wireless communications 'chiral' network to save humanity from extinction. This time, however, there will be more action and other new elements to expect, making it only apt to celebrate its return with fanfare — that is, a glorious Collector's Edition fit for any fan. Here's what to expect from the Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Collector's Edition, which also includes all pre-order bonus content comprising the Battle / Boost / Bokka Skeleton: Silver (Lv 1, Lv 2, Lv 3) cosmetic, and a quokka custom hologram: Digital download of the full game 15-inch Magellan Man statue 3-inch Dollman figurine Art cards Letter from Hideo Kojima In-game items: Machine Gun (MP Bullets) Lv 1 Early Unlock Battle Skeleton: Gold (Lv 1, Lv 2, Lv 3) Boost Skeleton: Gold (Lv 1, Lv 2, Lv 3) Bokka Skeleton: Gold (Lv 1, Lv 2, Lv 3) Patch 70: Quokka Patch 71: Chiral Feline Patch 72: Why Me? As expected of the centrepiece, the Magellan Man statue oozes a premium finish that translates to intricate sculpting and an impressive attention to detail, from the rust on its body to the design of its tar-drenched wings. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach releases exclusively for the PS5 on 24 June. Si Jia is a casual geek at heart – or as casual as someone with Sephiroth's theme on her Spotify playlist can get. A fan of movies, games, and Japanese culture, Si Jia's greatest weakness is the Steam Summer Sale. Or any Steam sale, really.
Geek Culture
23-06-2025
- Geek Culture
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach — Review
Regardless of the times, the tragedy of reality is that strife and dissolution will always persist in life. In the eyes of renowned video game designer Hideo Kojima, the road to a united utopia is achieved not in distance, but in relationships and social bonds. It may sound like a tenet from a hippie with an appetite for 80s and 90s cinema, but Kojima has masterfully illustrated this theme in Death Stranding , a delivery game by his then-newfound studio Kojima Productions. To some, the game was Kojima's magnum opus, and to others, a glorified walking simulator filled with cinematic cutscenes. Now, with Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, fans are eager to see what Kojima's sequel has to say about exchanging sticks (violence) for strands (unification). Narratively, Kojima has proven he has the tools and talent to spin a compelling, conceptually highbrow and cinematic tale about bringing humanity together. However, like any delivery errand rooted in the realities of painstaking mundanity, those who wish to experience the story and truly understand its message must be willing to trudge through extensive amounts of jargon and route planning. For the uninitiated, the world of Death Stranding begins with both a bang and a whimper, where souls of the dead who are unable to move on in the afterlife (represented by beaches) become ghost-like entities unseen by the naked eye, known as Beached Things (BTs). As more people die, more BTs roam the earth. Anyone swallowed by a BT results in a voidout, an explosion of energy akin to an atomic bomb and leaves a giant crater in its wake. In addition, the rain ages anyone who gets caught in it. Consequently, humanity has been driven to isolation, going underground in clusters or alone. To survive, these communities rely on porters to deliver materials and precious resources, and you are one such courier, Sam Porter Bridges, played by a returning Norman Reedus ( The Walking Dead ). To ensure the safety of porters, they use Bridge Babies (BB), a fetus extracted from a brain-dead mother and stored in a pod, to detect BTs. In the first Death Stranding , players are tasked with connecting bastions across the United States of America, integrating these communities into a 'Chiral Network', and thus unifying a fractured country into a new United Cities of America (UCA). Players do so by taking on deliveries and travelling between these bases, and through this journey, they learn of how BTs are formed and how they serve as precursors to the next Death Stranding, an Extinction Event that can wipe out all of humanity. While the UCA was the focus of Death Stranding , Death Stranding 2: On the Beach brings us to Australia through a portal known as a 'Plate Gate' located on the southern edge of Mexico but the name of the game here is still the same — deliver precious cargo across Australia's isolated communities and integrate them into the Chiral Network. Each order you take on will throw you into similar loops of planning your route, outfitting yourself with equipment for the journey, transporting the cargo to your destination, be awarded points (also known as 'Likes') based on your performance, and integrate the community you've arrived in to the Chiral Network. Including the cutscenes for the main story, players will be experiencing this game loop for about 40 hours. Compared to the UCA, the biomes Australia takes you to have shown how the Decima engine has evolved in generating its visual assets in leaps and bounds. Right from the start of the prologue and opening credits, the game looks and feels like a documentary, showing realistic, breathtaking dunes, rock formations, and cityscapes. Compared to the first game, there is less blue sand and so much more red dust, white snow, green foliage, and grey abandoned buildings, which makes porter work more pleasant through the hours. Porter work in Australia is more complex compared to Sam's journey across the UCA as in addition to the usual bandits, brigands, and BTs, Sam now has to prepare for harsh weather, environmental conditions, encounters with dangerous wildlife, and occasionally fight against robotic terrorists known as 'Ghost Mechs'. Instead of just grabbing your gear and going, you now have to actively weigh your options and choose the lesser evil to your next destination. More often than not, the shortest route – logically a straight line – may not be the optimal option as you may encounter BTs along the way, which may not be your cup of tea. Instead, you may want to make the detour and brave climbing rocky mountains, which introduce a different type of horror in managing your stamina, hoping you do not fall and damage your cargo or succumb to landslides and avalanches caused by earthquakes (dubbed 'Gate Quakes'). That said, environmental dangers are a welcome inclusion in the world of Death Stranding. Experiencing natural disasters in your travels, like bush fires, Gate Quakes, and rising water levels, brings a level of dynamics not present in the first game. To prepare you for greater dangers ahead compared to your time in the UCA, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach also takes a more action-oriented approach to its combat, with a wider arsenal of tools and weapons at your disposal to confront your adversaries. On top of the usual assault rifle, shotgun, and blood grenade to get rid of BTs, the game offers more innovative tools like a Blood Boomerang that uses blood bags instead of bullets, which is a great de-facto silent way to fight your enemies, or a Tar Cannon that can put out bushfires and act as a flamethrower at the same time. There's even a grenade that you can use to capture BTs, so you can use them to fight other BTs. In addition to a wider arsenal of tools is a new character progression system. You will be awarded skill points known as 'Memory', to invest in various APAS Enhancements, which make your next journey slightly easier. These enhancements come in nodes you activate, like 'Aim Assist' for your weapons or 'Instant Cargo Binding', where the scattering of cargo is prevented whenever Sam falls over. Your mastery of weapons (represented by levels) and other statistics like Carrying Capacity will also increase based on the equipment you use and the route you take. The game is also more lenient to failure. While players were met with a 'Game Over' screen once a BT swallows any human being in the first game, getting swallowed by a BT in Death Stranding 2 will result in the formation of a crater in the environment, making the area inaccessible for travel. This would just translate into a minor inconvenience where players would have to make a detour to reach their next destination. Killing people in the first game is a dangerous endeavour as dead bodies become potential candidates to cause a voidout, thus, a 'Game Over' screen that hampers progress, and there is an urgency to incinerate dead bodies by personally transporting them to an incinerator. In Death Stranding 2 , however, the denizens of Australia will dispose of any dead bodies that lie in your wake, resulting in a reduction of your total accumulated Likes. That said, although a wider arsenal of weapons and added room for failure empower you to boldly confront BTs and brigands more often, getting caught by the dead feels more inconsequential, which weakens one of the game's central themes of valuing human lives for connection. Although the utilisation of the incinerator in the first game feels like work, it encourages players to be more creative in adopting non-lethal ways to accomplish their tasks, and therefore, there is always room for an incinerator in Australia. Thankfully, you will be able to switch between lethal and non-lethal modes for all weapons, and weapons are pre-set to non-lethal, so there is no need to adopt lethal methods throughout the game. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach also takes a more deliberate, deeper approach to world-building, featuring more individuals studying the effects of the Death Stranding event, and other lore-specific aspects like chiralium and the tar. Although a greater depth to the world of Death Stranding is introduced, the game suffers from too much unnecessary complexity in introducing parts of this world. Why is there research on how tar and chiralium affect groundwater, and how is it relevant to our story? How does the tar help in healing diseases? Even the characters in the game do not currently know. While you may argue that learning about the effects of the Death Stranding alongside the denizens of this world plays a part in the immersion, how the game's lore is uncovered and communicated may just be too convoluted for any layman. The work is important, mysterious, and so complex that it can go over the heads of the casual player because what does 'parasitic chiral microbes' and 'tar current fluctuations' even mean? Fortunately, the game includes a corpus that spells out events of the story so far and jargon players may not be familiar with if they did not play the first game, and this helps elevate them to the same level of understanding if they are willing to pore over walls of text. On the grander scheme of things, it's more exciting to brood over the game's core themes of connection and how specific socio-political issues like expansionism and gun violence affect connected communities, which could have been explored more instead of convoluted world-building. The main question posed to players at the start of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was, 'Should We Have Connected?', and even Sam questioned the underlying agenda for expanding the chiral network outside of the UCA into Australia, citing concerns for the expansion to be politically masked by civility and acting as a vehicle for humanity's destruction. To that, it would seem that Kojima's stand on the matter is that humanity deserves to connect and establish relationships despite being in the wake of calamity, and this statement is expressed masterfully once again in the main events of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach . The story is wholesome and sometimes predictable; however, Norman Reedus' Sam and the supporting characters involved in the game's events have proven to be pivotal emotional backbones to its messaging. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach introduces both new and returning casts, all of whom play characters who are beautifully written. Norman Reedus has shown his deep understanding of grief in his performance as Sam, who is not only dealing with the harsh working environments as a porter, but also in his struggle to emotionally handle the deaths of those he loves. Meanwhile, scenes by Shioli Kutsuna ( Deadpool 2 ) as Rainy are sure to tug at your heartstrings and bring tears to your eyes. The player is also transported to the Spirit World against Luca Marinelli's ( The Old Guard ) Neil, a mysterious spirit of a dead porter, similar to that of Mads Mikkelsen's Cliff Unger in the World War 1 trenches of the first game. Although scenes with Marinelli are not as tense as Mikkelsen's mysterious, power-bringing aura, Marinelli brings an air of explosive intimidation in his character that can hold his own without comparison to Mikkelsen. On the other hand, Elle Fanning's ( Maleficent: Mistress of Evil )Tomorrow is also a memorable highlight in performance, spearheading most of the game's action-packed cutscenes, which are measured, exciting, and well-choreographed. Returning to the scene as the main villain is Troy Baker's Higgs. Although Baker is a natural at conveying the pained madness of Higgs as a character, the game's culmination, including the final fight and his conclusion, was underwhelming and anticlimactic. Regardless, returning to the world of Death Stranding in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was worth the 40 or so hours to finish, including savouring every moment of the game's main storyline cutscenes. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is released exclusively on the PS5 on 26 June 2025. Summary Death Stranding 2: On the Beach brings a level of innovative playability for casual gamers who are interested in the story. That is not to say that they will catch up easily with the game's events unless they spend time reading its jargon and concepts. Still, the game's gripping tale of loss, connection, and sometimes socio-political exploration is worth experiencing if gamers are willing to carry out the next delivery order. Gameplay - 8/10 Story - 9/10 Presentation - 9/10 Value - 9/10 Geek Satisfaction - 8/10 Crack open a cold one with Joey, because the moment you approach him, he will start talking about film and video games for days. He spends his waking moments during the weekends meditating on how the latest movie he's watched or game he's played has impacted his worldview. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Hideo Kojima Kojima Productions Review
