Hideo Kojima has revealed that he only got a chance to make his cult vampire RPG Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand because he took advantage of a completely different Konami project.
Speaking at the Sydney Film Festival, Kojima explained how he’s always looking for technological improvements that might be useful in the future – a habit that stretches all the way back to the early 2000s. That’s when he made Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand, a vampire fighting RPG that’s developed a cult following thanks to its central conceit – a UV sensor embedded in the cartridge that made your weapons more powerful when they were charged by real sunlight.
The problem with that idea, Kojima says, is that back in 2003 “UV sensors were so expensive at the time.” His team, however, had an advantage – Konami’s toy division had recently produced a UV teddy bear that had entirely flopped. As a result, the company was sitting on a storage container filled with unused sensors, which Kojima managed to pick up at a fraction of their value so that he could make Boktai.
That might sound like simple good fortune, but there’s a life lesson in this story that’s particularly helpful for game development: “you have to select the ideas at the best time,” Kojima explained. It’s no good having a great idea for an in-game gimmick if it’ll be far too expensive to produce that game.
Some of that philosophy is finding its way into the creation of Death Stranding 2. Kojima has made clear that he’s not out to make simple mainstream experiences, but knows that if he wants to keep his company in business, he needs to create games that can still find a wide audience in spite of his own personal tastes. That said, he did still make changes to Death Stranding 2’s script because playtesters were having too much fun, because I guess it’s good to keep everyone guessing.
