Hideo Kojima has been Hideo Kojiming his heart out this week. He’s revealed he’s got a USB drive containing his game ideas, so Kojima Productions doesn’t have to end with his death. This could be viral marketing for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach but, more so than that game, it’s really got us thinking about Hideo Kojima’s unmade zombie game.
If you missed out this moment of Kojima genius, it popped up in a 2007 Edge Magazine interview (via Wired). Kojima explained his vision, beginning with what sounds like your average online survival game, a “..a large town where half the inhabitants are zombies.”
You know the story – craft, find weapons, kill zombies, that sort of thing. But the twist would happen when a zombie gets its teeth into you. “Users would subscribe, get inside the town and get bitten. At that stage they become undead and can’t control their character – all they can do is modify the camera angle.”
“They’d see their character attacking humans and have to pay just to watch! The only way they could end it is by opening another account, hunting themselves down and killing themselves. Of course, the problem is that your second character can get bitten as well,” he adds.
It’s not a million miles away from Zombi, where you could hunt down your former self to get your equipment, but on a grander scale. This was back in 2007, when no-one would have taken a chance on an idea like this. And it was just a throwaway suggestion from Kojima. But we’d love to see him actively develop this.
Why? Partly it’s because we’re huge zombie fans. But mostly it’s because it’s from Hideo Kojima, a man famed for making games that are a little out there. On paper, it sounds like it’d be infuriating to lose your progress, becoming a zombie, but if you’d told us Death Stranding would have us gleefully dragging cargo across not-Iceland, we wouldn’t have believed you.
Granted, we’d probably get a bizarre urine-based game mechanic somewhere in there. That was certainly the case in Death Stranding, but it’s a price we’re prepared to pay for some Hideo Kojima zombie game goodness. Heck, you could even give us a scoreboard showing how many other players our zombie incarnation has chowed down on.
So if there are any video game execs out there about to hit the ‘Commission live-service extraction shooter’ button, take a breath. Instead, ask Hideo Kojima to take his zombie idea and run with it, keep the cutscenes less than three hours long, and you could be onto a winner.
