Maestro of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding Hideo Kojimaknown for its epic cinematic blockbusters, was brought into the gaming industry by an unexpected classic: Super Mario Bros.
The four-decade-old platformer may not have had the most obvious influence on Hideo Kojima's work when you look at the games he's released over the generations, but it's what led him to become a developer in the first place.
“[I] I played it for a year. I was a college student. I skipped school to play at home,” Kojima said. Wired Japan. “Without Super Mario, I probably wouldn't be in this industry. Yes. Although I can't play it now. This is a side scrolling action game. Mario simply moves from left to right. Basically, he just jumps.”
The creator of the original game noted that the first Super Mario “had almost no plot” other than rescuing a damsel princess in distress from an evil monster, but that didn't really matter. “It felt like you were on an adventure,” Kojima continued. “When I saw it, even though it was pixel art with no story, I felt that one day this medium would surpass cinema. This belief led me to the gaming industry.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Kojima mentioned Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa as directors who had a big influence on him, but none more so than John Carpenter. “He challenged the genre,” Kojima said of the director of “The Thing” and “Halloween.”
Metal Gear Solid 2 is “often mistaken for being a story about artificial intelligence,” says Hideo Kojima, but it's really about “what human life will be like” in the digital age.
