Hideo Kojima, the legendary creator behind Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, has a very specific vision for his final moment: sitting in a darkened cinema just as the previews end and the main feature is about to begin.
The 62-year-old game director made the declaration at Il Cinema in Piazza, an outdoor film festival held by the Piccolo America Foundation in Rome earlier this month. Speaking in Japanese, Kojima explained the appeal of his imagined exit.
"I've always thought that when I die, I would like to die in a movie theater," he said, according to a translation by IGN. "I love the bit before the movie starts the most. Enter the movie theater, the lights go off and commercials and trailers play, yeah? I'd like to die just before the movie starts."
He delivered the line with a serious tone and a faint smile. For Kojima, it's not just idle musing. The man has stated on his X profile that 70 percent of his body is made up of movies.
This isn't his first time contemplating mortality. Last year, Kojima revealed to Edge magazine that his perspective on life and time shifted dramatically during the pandemic. A serious illness and an eye operation forced him to confront his own fragility in ways he hadn't before.
"Turning 60 was less of a turning point in my life than my experiences during the pandemic," Kojima told the outlet. "I fell seriously ill at that time, and also had an eye operation. Until then, I didn't think I was old, you know? I just didn't feel my age, and I assumed I would be able to create for as long as I live."
That confidence shattered when illness struck. "But then I became sick, and I couldn't create anything. And I saw lots of people around me passing away at that time. I was confronted with death," he said. "Perhaps I have 10 years?"
In an interview with GQ last year, Kojima opened up about his deepest fears as he ages. "What I am most afraid of is time," he said. "I am afraid of dying and having dementia. I am afraid of forgetting things when I get old. I am afraid that I won't even realise what I am forgetting."
Kojima's recent trip to Rome involved far more than cryptic musings on mortality. At the film festival, he participated in panel discussions and introduced multiple films to audiences, each selection revealing his cinematic influences and design philosophy.
On June 5, he presented Dario Argentino's Profondo Rosso, a 1975 Italian thriller. Kojima praised the moment when the protagonist and viewer simultaneously discover the truth. "It is something I try to put in my own games as well," he said. He also noted that Argentino's gorier imagery influenced his early works like Policenauts and Snatcher, though he moved away from such content when developing for PlayStation consoles.
A week later, Kojima introduced Shunya Ito's 1972 film Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, part of a cult exploitation series from Toei Studio. The film starred Meiko Kaji and later became a major influence on Quentin Tarantino, who sampled Kaji's theme song for Kill Bill. Kojima highlighted how the young crew behind the low-budget film achieved something unique through inventive cinematography and bold camera work, lessons he carries into his own game design.
Perhaps most tellingly, Kojima introduced Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly alongside Death Stranding 2 actor Luca Marinelli. Growing up in a film-loving household, Kojima was exposed to both American and Italian Westerns and was struck by their fundamentally different moral frameworks. American Westerns presented clear-cut heroes and villains, while Leone's Italian Westerns featured morally ambiguous characters who felt far more human. That ambiguity appealed to him as much as it did in the work of Akira Kurosawa.
Kojima's cinematic sensibility has shaped his entire career. His 1987 debut Metal Gear and 1988's Snatcher bore clear film influences, but it was the 1998 PlayStation sensation Metal Gear Solid that brought movie-like storytelling to gaming with cinematic lighting, fully voiced dialogue, and lengthy cutscenes that rivaled film production values. Kojima cited war films like The Great Escape and The Guns of Navarrone as inspiration, while also basing protagonist Solid Snake's look on Kurt Russell's Snake Plisskin from Escape from New York.
By the time he created Death Stranding, Kojima had fully embraced the overlap between games and cinema, casting Hollywood actors like Norman Reedus and Lea Seydoux and capturing their full performances digitally.
Kojima remains an obsessive film consumer and collector. His X account regularly features his thoughts on recent theatrical viewings and Blu-ray pickups spanning genres, countries, and decades. He appeared on an episode of Criterion's closet picks, visibly thrilled to discuss his selections from a vast library of physical media.
That passion for physical media has increasingly become a statement of principle. When Sony announced plans to end disc production for PlayStation 5 games by 2028, Kojima retweeted warnings about the dangers of a fully digital future. At the Rome festival, he specifically called out the decision as troubling.
"Since production is ending in 2028, this is about video games, but I grew up with physical media, so I find it really sad," he said. "Currently, I've been buying up a lot of Blu-rays, such as various movies, and CDs too."
Kojima is currently developing OD, an experimental horror game being published by Xbox Game Studios in collaboration with Jordan Peele. The project remains without a release date, leaving fans to wonder when the prolific director might deliver his next cinematic gaming experience.
Author Emily Chen: "Kojima's romanticization of dying in that perfect theater moment before the curtain rises says everything about a man whose life has been defined by the spaces between anticipation and revelation."
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