Hideo Kojima

Hideo Kojima (小島 秀夫 Kojima Hideo?, born August 24, 1963)  is a Japanese video game designer, screenwriter, director, and producer, widely recognized as an ​auteur​ of video games. His most notable video games are the Metal Gear series of stealth games, the Zone of the Enders mech-combat series, as well as the adventure games ​Snatcher​ and ​Policenauts​. He is responsible for the demo of Silent Hills, P.T..

He founded the subsidiary Kojima Productions in 2005, after starting at ​Konami Digital Entertainment​, where he rose to vice president in 2011. In 2015, Kojima Productions temporarily disbanded following company restructuring at Konami, and in December, Kojima's employment contract with Konami was officially terminated. On December 15, 2015, Kojima revealed that he had re-formed Kojima Productions as an independent studio and was working with Sony on a PlayStation 4 exclusive.​ At E3 2016, Kojima personally announced the game's title as Death Stranding.

Trivia

 * An inspiration for Kojima's work on Death Stranding is that of Kōbō Abe's short novel Rope, which the director read in high school. The core keywords during the game's conception – "stick" and "rope" – are said to originate from Abe's work.