Hideo Kojima

Hideo Kojima was born in Tokyo, Japan, but his family moved to western Japan shortly after his birth. Growing up as a latchkey kid, he had to deal with loneliness and loss as a child, when his father passed away while he was just 13 years old.

From an early age, he knew that he wanted to be a writer and illustrator, but faced a lot of pressure to seek out a safer and financially stable line of work. Despite discouragement from his family and peers, as a teen, he wrote and illustrated original short stories and sent them to magazines, although none ever got published.

While attending college and studying economics, Kojima spent a lot of his free time playing video games, which at the time was a new medium that hadn't been explored much.

He shocked his peers by announcing in his fourth year of college that he wanted to design video games, even though his previous ambition had been to become a film director. Even though most of his friends discouraged him from pouring his energy into an untested creative outlet, he cites unwavering support from his mother as a big influence in his decision to pursue video games.

Kojima's early career was marked by a lot of rejection, and his video game ideas failed to gain any traction with publishers. In 1986 he was hired by the game publisher ‘Konami Digital Entertainment’ to work in their MSX home computer division as a designer and planner.

Owing to the system's limited color palette and resources, the assignment was a bit of a disappointment to the creative and imaginative Kojima, who had hoped to work on the more colorful Nintendo system.

Many of Kojima's early ideas were refused, but he got his big breakthrough when he was asked to take over a project called ‘Metal Gear’. He fixed problems with the game's clunky combat system by instead focusing the game play on sneaking and subterfuge.

Released in 1987, the first ‘Metal Gear’ game introduced its tough protagonist ‘Solid Snake’ to the world, and the title remains one of Kojima's most recognizable and successful franchises.

During the '90s Kojima's career finally took off and he began developing his own projects for the ‘Konami MSX2’ as well as for other gaming systems, including a sequel to his breakout hit ‘Metal Gear’.

Beginning with the release of the first iteration in 1986, the ‘Metal Gear’ franchise is Kojima's biggest and most recognizable contributions to the gaming world. The main character of the title, ‘Solid Snake’, has even made appearances in other video games like ‘Nintendo's Super Smash Bros Brawl’.