Kojima Making Games Meet Movies
If there’s one person we weren’t expecting to see mooching around the Prada Spring Summer 2025 catwalk it was Hideo Kojima. Although it makes a whole lot more sense knowing he was there in the context of recently collaborating with Danish movie director Nicolas Winding Refn and using Prada’s Aoyama Tokyo space to host their creation. What transpired was an interactive gallery that married Kojima’s themes of connection in Death Stranding with Refn’s cinematic poetics.
Kojima has a way of bringing people together, and not just in the allegorical delivery game he’s been working on these last couple years. The exhibition transcended the language barrier between him and his Danish friend by using tapes that had been AI translated into different languages, and could be listened to in snippets to arrange a conversation between the pair as they float around on TV screens. The games he makes are also actively bridging the gap between the worlds of cinema and games, which many of the cameos in the games being just a big excuse to hang out with actors and directors he likes. Alongside Refn, Guillermo Del Toro and Jordan Vogt-Roberts (Kong: Skull Island) were in the first Death Stranding, as well as a healthy sprinkling of actors. This allure he’s had for Cinema has been with him his entire career, as he first started writing fiction in the hopes that it’d win awards and movie deals. Instead he’s had to make that dream himself via the medium of videogames. But according to Refn this may have more lasting staying power.
“I think that the 2D image of TV and movies are obviously struggling to remain [relevant] the same way because nothing new is being invented.” Said Refn Earlier this year at the Esports World Cup in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
“Technology doesn’t really enhance a lot more than what we have, where obviously gaming technology drives the innovation and drives the evolution. But what is going to be interesting is that – not now, but at a certain point — the convulsion and everything becomes as one. [And] that is still an ongoing philosophical dilemma to figure out. How do those two become more integrated? How can you cry in a game the same way you would cry in a movie?”
Kojima may yet have his chance to be part of cinema as he recently announced they were working on a movie, but of course, he had to do it his way… which is the A24 way.
“Regarding the film adaptation of Death Stranding, major studios approached me with ideas to turn it into a blockbuster or a massive trilogy. However, that wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted to create something out of the ordinary—an indie film that would satisfy cinephiles. That’s why I approached A24.”