With Death Stranding 2: On the Beach right around the corner, we’re ready to dive back into the post-apocalyptic world Kojima Productions first introduced in 2019. As we enter this next chapter, director Hideo Kojima finds himself reflecting on the unexpected parallel between the first game’s continental rift and the real-world coronavirus pandemic that soon followed.
In a conversation with Edge magazine, Kojima discussed how he had already written the sequel by the time the pandemic hit, only for the state of the world to horrifyingly reflect the story he had told in Death Stranding.
When Kojima returned to the Kojima Productions’ office after an undisclosed but severe illness, he found it empty. At the time, everyone was working remotely, and it struck a chord with him. “I felt that perhaps I would never meet anyone again,” Kojima shared.
“Something had been lost,” he lamented, “Physically, we weren’t connected anymore.”
Death Stranding launched only a handful of months before the world was suddenly isolated. In the game, we take on the role of Sam Porter Bridges, an on-the-nose name for his role as a porter tasked with rebuilding the communication bridges throughout the country with the use of the chiral network.
A fictionalized take on our internet, the chiral network allowed communication to resume between a country that had been forced to isolate, the outside world far too dangerous and deadly for most.
Kojima took no pride in finding he had inadvertently told the story of a future similar to what would come to pass, and found our own digital connections unsatisfactory. Zoom parties and hangouts were an empty substitution for the real thing: “We were having drinking parties and school events, but now entirely online, an almost entirely digital existence.”
At the time, this digital existence and his recovery reinvigorated Kojima’s desire to make games “that don’t already exist in the world.”
The success of Death Stranding has left many players excited for the next installment, and players will finally get to see just what Kojima and his team have cooked up in the hotly anticipated sequel on June 26.
