The Japanese TV show featuring Hideo Kojima has finally been unleashed upon us

Death Stranding
(Image credit: The Game Awards, Geoff Keighley)

A Japanese TV show featuring Hideo Kojima is now available to watch outside the country with an official English translation.

If you're a fan of Kojima, or have been following him on social media over the last few years (scrolling through his many, many retweets), you might know he appeared on a Japanese TV show called Game Genome back in 2021. The original run on Japanese TV featured famed Japanese musician Gen Hoshino as a panellist, but only one episode had Kojima as a guest star.

Thankfully, Japanese broadcaster NHK has translated the series for the first time with official English subtitles. It's this episode with Kojima that's available to watch with English subtitles right now on NHK's website, and the program runs at right around 50 minutes, featuring bonus content not seen in the original broadcast on Japanese TV.

It was from this episode that the bizarre commentary on Death Stranding's themes originated. Hoshino posited that Death Stranding is secretly a homage to various video game genres, such as fighting games via the Higgs boss fight, and racing games through Death Stranding's own racing minigame, with Kojima remarking that he'd discovered the "hidden theme" of the game.

Yes, we were left just as confused as you are right now by Hoshino's comments and Kojima's agreement. We still don't really know how Death Stranding 2 is going to top all of that, if the original game really was a tribute to the high points of video game culture, but we can't wait to see what other whacky concepts Kojima Productions can pull out of the bag.

Elsewhere, Kojima previously revealed that Death Stranding 2's story was rewritten after the pandemic, after Kojima experienced the onset of COVID-19.

Hirun Cryer

Hirun Cryer is a freelance reporter and writer with Gamesradar+ based out of U.K. After earning a degree in American History specializing in journalism, cinema, literature, and history, he stepped into the games writing world, with a focus on shooters, indie games, and RPGs, and has since been the recipient of the MCV 30 Under 30 award for 2021. In his spare time he freelances with other outlets around the industry, practices Japanese, and enjoys contemporary manga and anime.