A director in Tokyo watches actors in Los Angeles on a screen and talks with them. That is how the Los Angeles shoot for DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH, released on PlayStation 5 in 2025, went ahead during the pandemic. A device called MADO (“window”) supported it. Hideo Kojima talked about KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS’ first 10 years and what comes next at a preview of BEYOND THE STRAND, the studio’s 10th anniversary exhibition.

Kojima describes the studio’s history in phases. The first goal was to ship DEATH STRANDING, the studio’s debut game. The sequel, DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH, falls under Phase 2. It started about three years later than he had planned, he says, because the pandemic moved work to people’s homes and slowed progress.

Phase 3 covers the new titles OD - KNOCK and PHYSINT. Kojima intends to move toward entertainment that takes upcoming technology into account, though he says plans have at times slipped by two or three years and haven’t gone as intended. KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS is working on AR with Niantic Spatial. Kojima predicts that AR will shape daily life and that the boundaries between games, screens and real life will blur. That, he says, is where Phase 3 is headed.

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For the remote sessions, even dozens of smartphones and tablets couldn’t get his direction across. MADO was the fix: two units in Tokyo and two in Los Angeles.

As a director, Kojima builds waves of emotion, such as laughter, into the work so that tension doesn’t last too long. He compares this approach to Alfred Hitchcock’s. He doesn’t see it as gags, he says, but as a balance of tension and release.

He says he put on the exhibition because games are fun to play and fun to make. Sometimes the process of making, more than the finished product, is the real craft, he says. He also hopes the exhibition will draw young people into creative work.

Kojima believes stories with human drama are what travel across borders. He says the first METAL GEAR SOLID was not made with sales in mind. It sold because he packed it with what he wanted to make and what he loved, he recalls.

He likened AI to Photoshop or a word processor: a tool for efficiency. He worries about where the joy of making things is headed, but thinks it will hold up for the next five or ten years.

His own account of where Phase 3 is headed should make the next OD - KNOCK and PHYSINT news easier to place.