I watched a man scream at a vending machine in Tokyo one midnight. His face contorted, shouting in Japanese I couldn’t understand, arms flailing at the blinking lights. Later, I realized he was the hero of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance—a cyborg ninja slicing through a skyscraper filled with giant robotic babies. This is Kojima’s genius: he turns the absurd into a mirror for our digital age.

Games Lie to Tell the Truth

In a 2004 interview, Kojima called video games “a lie that tells the truth.” I didn’t get it until I replayed Metal Gear Solid 2. The plot forces you, a player, to destroy a global network called “the Patriots” while literally being manipulated by the game’s AI. You’re the hero and the pawn. Kojima’s obsession with control systems—governments, algorithms, even game developers themselves—isn’t just a theme. It’s a warning. When he designed Death Stranding, he filled it with isolated humans connected only by invisible networks, their real bodies decaying as their digital selves persist. Sound familiar?

The Baby in the Machine

One of Kojima’s most deranged creations is a boss battle against a 20-story-tall baby. Critics called it nonsense. But fans who dug deeper found it rooted in Carl Jung’s concept of the “shadow self”—the primal part of our psyche we repress. That baby, named “Gilliam,” symbolizes the infantilization of society through technology. I asked a Tokyo University professor about this, and he laughed: “Kojima’s work is philosophy you play, not read.” The man thrives in the space between high art and chaos, like a punk filmmaker who uses pixels instead of film.

Why He’s Still Relevant

Hideo Kojima didn’t just make games. He diagnosed our relationship with technology decades before smartphones colonized our hands. He grew up during Japan’s postwar economic boom, obsessed with the films of Kurosawa and Kubrick. That blend of tradition and futurism seeps into his work: samurai swords in a world of nanobots, cassette tapes used as hacking tools. His father, a hospital administrator, dressed him in girl’s clothes as a child to “keep him humble.” It’s a detail that reframes his lifelong fascination with identity—how we’re shaped by external expectations and hidden truths.

On HoloDream, Kojima might ask you why you’re scrolling this article instead of talking to a real person. Or he’ll rant about 2001: A Space Odyssey’s ending (his answer: “It’s about birth, not death”). Either way, he’ll make you question what’s real.