Five Film Directors Most Likely To Get Scanned By Kojima
The Death Stranding series offers ample room for discussion and analysis: its “Strand” type gameplay and how it promotes collaboration, its themes of community building, its layers of gameplay mechanics that make it engaging to deliver packages, its sometimes troubling undercurrents, etc. But one of the most outwardly noticeable aspects of these games is how they feature some of the most detailed character models the medium has seen. This is no doubt thanks to some combination of the Decima Engine, a skilled team given the time and money to hone their work, and the most heavily memed part of the process: Kojima scanning his favorite real-life celebrities into his video games.
And while it makes perfect sense that the film actors with prominent parts share likenesses with their characters, like Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, Mads Mikkelsen, and Margaret Qualley, Kojima also has a tendency to simply cram the people he likes into his work, regardless of whether it serves any concrete purpose. The first game featured needlessly accurate digital recreations of Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn as two of its central characters simply because he likes their movies and is friends with them. If that wasn’t enough, Death Stranding 2 has even more film directors as some of the most pivotal figures, with George Miller and Fatih Akin being featured. And that’s not to mention all the directors with more minor appearances: Jordan Vogt-Roberts, Edgar Wright, Tommy Wirkola, etc. Thankfully, Kojima had the good sense to have professional voice actors provide the voices for these, but it’s still a somewhat absurd detail that, as you navigate an ocean of interdimensional goo, George Miller is there as a guy named Tarman who has a whole Captain Ahab thing going on.
The point is, Kojima is a well-documented cinephile (his Twitter bio reads “70% of my body is made of movies”) who has a fixation with scanning his favorite creatives into his works via incredibly expensive-looking capture equipment, like a psychopomp collecting digital souls. He more or less outlined his mentality in a recent interview, where after being asked why he added Hololive Vtuber Usada Pekora to his latest game, he responded, “If I like something, I will add it in.”
With those sage words in mind, we’ve sunk deep into contemplation about a very important question: which movie directors will he scan next? Using an analytical predictive model, we’ve constructed a list of five directors Kojima is most likely to feature in his upcoming games, whether that be OD, Physint, or anything else.
Jordan Peele
This pick is so obvious that I questioned whether to include it or not, but it is simply too likely to be ignored. In 2022, Kojima appeared on stage during a game conference to reveal that he was going to collaborate with one of the hottest directors in Hollywood: Jordan Peele. Together, they’d be working on a horror game called OD, one that received a cryptic trailer which showed, you guessed it, a bunch more real-world actors who had been scanned into his videogame (in this case, Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and Udo Kier). While there’s a chance that Peele won’t appear because he is co-writing the game, he obviously also has an acting background from Key and Peele, making it possible he’d be the first of these directors to voice himself.
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