Hideo Kojima has announced… something? Or he’s announced that he’s going to announce something, but the announcement is its own announcement of, oh god stop the internet I want to get off. For a creator that made a game about information overload and the surfeit of junk in contemporary digital life, he doesn’t exactly practice what he preaches.
Kojima has previously announced that the studio will be showing off a VR hallway at TGS (don’t ask), then recently a new website launched with a blanked-out face and the phrase “Who Am I?” superimposed atop it. Now our boy’s at it again, tweeting out the same face:
The answer to “WHO” at TGS will be in the next “WHERE”. pic.twitter.com/y6Y6l7gAxoOctober 5, 2022
It comes with some maddeningly on-brand text, which is both English and semi-gibberish: “The answer to ‘WHO’ at TGS will be in the next ‘WHERE’.” WHAT does that mean and WHEN?!
Clear as mud, though the implication seems to be that Kojima’s going to reveal the identity (of Elle Fanning, most fans reckon) at one of the big year-end shows: given his relationship with Geoff Keighley, I’d stick a fiver on it being at The Game Awards.
The silhouetted face may well not be Fanning, of course: but it does look an awful lot like her (here’s one fan comparing images while huffing the copium). Fanning’s list of projects is as long as your arm, but one element of note is that she’s previously worked with Kojima buddy and director Nicholas Winding Refn, who is the mocap actor for Heartman in Death Stranding.
Whether it’s Fanning or not, the other unanswered question is whether this is the beginning of the hype for Death Stranding 2 (which is in the works) or the game that Kojima Productions is making in partnership with Microsoft. The former is in production, and the way Kojima’s been tweeting about motion capture sessions recently suggests it’s full steam ahead, while with the latter both sides have been careful to say that it’s some way off.
Kojima certainly keeps busy. As well as those two games and the VR hallway, he’s been producing a podcast for Spotify and helped make a watch with NASA (which bizarrely comes with a wearable skull face mask). You kinda have to respect the hustle even if, now and then, it would be nice for him just to announce something substantial, rather than Hideo Kojima announcing another Hideo Kojima announcement.
