Hideo Kojima learned "so many ways to kill people" in training, says it's "kind of sad" many devs "don't know how to dismantle a gun or shoot a gun" despite making military games

lea seydoux as fragile smoking a cigarette
(Image credit: Kojima Productions)

Never one to turn down an opportunity for being cryptic, Hideo Kojima recently revealed that he can kill people in lots of ways if he wanted to.

I can think of a few myself – there's the classic piano-falling-on-head trick, some kind of TNT explosion, running down a highway vista only to discover at the last moment that it was a painted canvas disguising an extreme cliff drop.

But Kojima isn't making Tom and Jerry; he's a hardcore gamer who breeds characters named things like "Master Psycho." So the Metal Gear and Death Stranding director told fashion retailer SSENSE in a new interview that, unhappy with the fact many devs behind military games "probably don't know how to dismantle a gun or shoot a gun," he decided to undergo "training" and learn "so many ways to kill people as well."

The alternative is unpleasant to Kojima – he finds military game developers without gun experience "kind of sad." In fact, Kojima seems disappointed with the current state of game development at large.

He tells SSENSE that he noticed many game trailers at this year's Summer Game Fest involved similar concepts – killing aliens and spilling blood around castle ruins, and so on.

"Even the visuals and the systems are pretty much the same," Kojima says. "A lot of people enjoy this, I understand. But it is important to put something really new in there for the industry."

"Something really new" such as a game developer who I think should have limited access to both bullets and Elle Fanning. Right, I'm starting to get it now.

It's no wonder Death Stranding 2's hyper-realistic visuals are so good as Hideo Kojima shares behind-the-scenes footage from a "live-action lighting workshop" from over 2 years ago.

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Ashley Bardhan
Senior Writer

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.

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