Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding maestro Hideo Kojima, known for his grand and filmic blockbusters, was sucked into the game industry by an unexpected classic: Super Mario Bros.
The four-decade-old platformer isn’t the most obvious influence on Hideo Kojima’s work when you look at the type of games he’s put out for generations, but it’s the one that led to him becoming a developer in the first place.
“[I] played it for a year. I was a college student. I skipped school to play at home,” Kojima told Wired Japan. “Without Super Mario, I probably wouldn’t have been in this industry. Yeah. I can’t really play it now, though. It’s a side-scrolling action game. Mario just goes left to right. Basically just jumping.”
The auteur game creator noted that the first Super Mario “had almost no story” aside from saving a damsel in distress princess from an evil monster, but it didn’t matter much. “It felt like you were on an adventure,” Kojima continued. “When I saw that, although it was pixel art with no story, I felt this medium would one day surpass movies. That conviction brought me to the game industry.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Kojima cited Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa as film directors who influenced him greatly, but none more than John Carpenter. “He defied genre,” Kojima said of The Thing and Halloween director.
Metal Gear Solid 2 is “often mistaken for a story about AI,” Hideo Kojima says, but it’s actually about “what human life would become” in the digital age
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