Hideo Kojima has plenty of gameplay ideas involving time rolling around in his head, and he shared a handful of ones he scrapped during a recent interview about game design.
On a recent episode of his radio podcast KOJI10, the storied game designer and noted cinephile shared some insight into some gameplay ideas he’s had over the years but had to abandon for one reason or another. And according to a translation from IGN, ideas ranged from the mundane, such as letting a protagonist's hair and beard grow out over time, to bigger ones that would impact gameplay, like in-game aging.
But the most interesting idea he scrapped turns a common problem in today’s era of longer games into a full-blown feature. He proposed a mechanic where the protagonist would forget how to do certain skills if the player hadn’t played in a long while, reflecting a real issue many players have had themselves. The more time the player abandons the game, the more forgetful the character would become.
“Players would have to take a week off work or school to play it,” Kojima joked on his show.
Kojima is no stranger to games where the corresponding game’s internal clock is a factor. In Metal Gear Solid 3, spoiler warning, he famously included a boss fight with a legendary, century-old sniper who could be defeated by waiting for him to croak from old age (or fast-forwarding the console clock a few days). Kojima seemingly never moved on from incorporating the real passage of time in his games in creative ways.
“Originally in Death Stranding 2, I was going to have Sam’s beard gradually grow out over time, and the player would have to shave it. If they didn’t, Sam would end up looking unkempt,” he said. “However, as Norman Reedus is a big star, I didn’t want to make him look uncool.”
It’s a feature other games, like Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher 3 have incorporated as a cool customization feature.
Another idea he had was for a full game about aging. The protagonist would be born, starting out as a child, and eventually grow into an adult, then an older person. As the player ages throughout the game, their abilities would change.
“If you keep playing the game, you will become a 70 or 80-year-old man,” he explained. “However, at this age, you will be weaker, your eyesight will worsen. When you are a teenager you’ll be able to run faster but by the time you reach 60 you’ll slow down a bit.”
Kojima said he’s convinced no one would actually buy a game like this. However, games like Sifu incorporated this idea in pretty smart ways. The martial arts roguelike has players growing older with each subsequent run. As they age, their abilities and durability alter slightly. Similarly, he had an idea for a game where players must age required resources as if they were cheese or wine in real-time.
But his most head-scratching idea is what he calls a “forgetting game.” Here, the player would have to play through the game in consistent consecutive play sessions or risk losing necessary abilities due to forgetfulness. Not playing for extended periods of time could have effects like not knowing “how to fire their gun or what their job is.” Kojima said the mechanics could go as far as having the player’s character forget how to move.
It’s a pretty nuts idea that I personally wouldn’t want to play through. In fact, I’ve hoped more and more developers would do the total opposite. Just this week, a player on X discovered that Warhorse Studios’ Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 will let players opt-in to see tutorials of the game’s more complex mechanics again if they haven’t played in a while. Meanwhile, games like Witcher 3 and Avowed do an excellent job documenting its lengthy story, letting players catch up to speed if needed.
But while I may be averse to a game that punishes me for taking extended breaks, Kojima’s wild scrapped idea shows the breadth of how people approach game design. Gameplay elements one development team may want to avoid can be turned on its head and gamified by others. Some of the medium coolest innovations are the result of exactly that.
The clearing of objectives on a map is something many players find satisfying. And yet, totally doing away with that idea became a central design philosophy for From Software and its award-winning RPGs. Even Kojima Production’s Death Stranding essentially made one of the most compelling games in years gamifying the mundane traversal most other games try to skirt over. There are audiences for every experience. And sometimes terrible-sounding ideas, like some of the ones Kojima mentioned on his show, are the seeds of something special.
Ultimately, it seems that Kojima is firmly in the camp of easing players back into the wild, and complex world of Death Stranding. Earlier this month, the designer revealed that it will incorporate a feature that lets players keep track of lore and fiction-specific terms in real time, borrowing from games like Final Fantasy XVI. It should be a feature that new players will appreciate, as the first game spins a pretty out-there tale about what happens to humanity after modern civilization collapses.
