Hideo Kojima is not a man prone to understatement, and with two new projects in the works, you can expect a lot hype over the coming months and years. For those who haven’t been keeping up, Kojima Productions has announced they're making a cloud-native game with Xbox, a project that started life as a Stadia exclusive before Google abandoned first-party development. It’s also very likely Death Stranding 2 is being developed for Sony, but that hasn’t been officially confirmed yet.
Speaking about his cloud-powered Xbox game in an interview with The Guardian, Kojima was his usual grandiose self, claiming the project could “turn things around” for not only just the gaming industry, but the movie industry as well.
“It’s almost like a new medium. If this succeeds, it will turn things around – not just in the game industry, but in the movie industry as well.”
It’s no secret that Kojima is essentially a frustrated filmmaker trapped in the gaming industry, so the line above is certainly intriguing. Could Kojima’s Xbox project be some sort of transmedia movie-game hybrid? These kinds of things have been tried before, including by Microsoft with Remedy’s Quantum Break, but it would be interesting to see Kojima try his hand at it. Then again, a lot of players tend to balk at games pushing too far into movie-like territory.
For his part, Kojima admits there are challenges to trying something new, but he’d rather be the first to do something, even if it means not all the kinks are worked out…
“You can have successful experiments, but there’s a long distance between an experiment and a place where it’s something that becomes a part of everyday usage. For the first person, everything is hard. But I want to be the first. I want to keep being the first.”
A release window for Kojima’s Xbox game has yet to be revealed. What do you think? Is Kojima going to blow our minds with this one or will it have around the same impact as the “strand-type game” revolution?
