When Hideo Kojima, the prolific game-maker behind the Metal Gear Solid series, was a boy, he had a vision of what the 21st century would look like. “There would be no war, no poverty. It would be like Star Trek. All the world would be like one.” He recalls this, through a translator, backstage at a Manhattan gallery, the site of a one-night art exhibition showcasing all the concept illustrations that went into his latest project, Death Stranding. “That’s what it was supposed to be.” Obviously, we never reached that future, but Kojima and his videogames have become considerably better at tapping into the cultural and political zeitgeist before anyone else.
In 2017, players were convinced Kojima had predicted their current reality through the story of Metal Gear Solid 2, released about 16 years prior. A scene between the characters of Raiden and The Colonel from this gaming franchise took off online at the time, way before “Fake News” became a rallying chant for the current sitting president. Kojima’s characters remark how “trivial information is accumulating every second” in this “digitized world” that also “selectively rewards development of half-truths.”
Now, in 2019, the cast of Death Stranding believe Kojima again “connected” — a word they use quite often in trying to describe the videogame — with something entirely new. “It’s not a kill-them-all, be-the-last-one-standing game,” says The Walking Dead‘s Norman Reedus, who portrays the star character, Sam Bridges. “The whole point is to connect and you have to fight to get there and you have to grow as a person. You have a billion people all doing that at the same time. That’s going to do some good, and I think now, especially, is a good time for that to happen.” The extent of Mads Mikkelsen‘s videogame knowledge prior to Death Stranding started and ended with Space Invaders. (Like, the original Space Invaders.) But, for the Hannibal veteran, who portrays an antagonist to Sam named Cliff, Kojima’s new world “has persuaded me to start over and recapture some of my lost game play.”
Source: Death Stranding with Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen bridges videogames, cinema | EW.com