In an interview with a French YouTube channel at Gamescom, translated on Reddit, Hideo Kojima has shared that he was working on another game before jumping onto the Death Stranding project. That game had to be canceled and won’t probably ever become a reality.
As you might’ve guessed, since game development is a business about iteration, trying and canceling until you find the right thing to start from, Death Stranding was “literally the last” idea Kojima came up with back in the days.
“I had many ideas and concepts, but to be honest, Death Stranding was not the first idea, it was literally the last,” said Kojima. “There was another game that I had to abandon, and I will probably never come back to it. So that is how Death Stranding was born.”
“In 2016 we were a handful of people in a tiny office, and in June of the same year we started the game design, casting without even knowing the whole game”, he added, reminding a timeline he had already shared when accused of being a slow developer.
“It’s like a marathon, where the middle is the hardest part. The start is easy, everyone is full of energy, then in the middle, you cannot see the end, and it feels like there is no end, and it’s a terribly draining. But honestly, the closer we get to the end, the more we see that arrival, which gives us extra strength.”
Of course, it is sad to hear that a project from such a talented game designer and director has been canceled, not only because we won’t ever get to play it, but also because he won’t probably disclose the details until very down the road as not to waste design ideas he could apply somewhere else.
At any rate, with Death Stranding releasing on November 8, 2019, we’ll get to see if he made the right choice betting on this PS4 exclusive instead one of his “many ideas.”
