Metal Gear and Death Stranding creator Hideo Kojima recently echoed Tom Cruise when talking about his future plans, declaring: “I want to keep creating things until I die.”

Since starting out in the industry at Konami in 1986, Kojima has created a variety of games, including Snatcher, the innovative sunlight-based GBA title Boktai, and the infamous P.T. demo. In a recent interview centering around Kojima’s latest game Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Game*Spark asked Kojima about his motivations and thoughts on why he continues to make games.

“I’m the same as Tom Cruise (laughs),” he said. “My life has been dedicated to creating things. That is my joy. I want to create for as long as my body and my brain keep working. I will think about (stopping) if it begins to inconvenience the people around me, but I want to keep creating things until I die.”

In likening himself to Cruise, Kojima is probably referring to the recent comments made by the actor at the premiere of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. On the red carpet, Cruise told The Hollywood Reporter that he will never stop making movies, even quipping that intends to keep making them into his 100s.

Talking of movies, in Kojima’s comment to Game*Spark, he didn’t specify creating games, just creating. This suggests that Kojima is open to making something that is not a game in the future. In a recent video interview with French media outlet Brut, Kojima revealed that, depending on how Kojima Productions is doing after it has completed Microsoft game OD and Sony game Physint, he would like to make a movie.

With their long cutscenes and cinematic presentation, some have argued that many of Kojima’s games are already movie-like (we’ve even worked out exactly how much of each Kojima game is cutscenes). However, in the interview with Game*Spark, Kojima addresses this, explaining that even though his games are influenced by movies, he is always focused on making a game first and foremost.

“I grew up watching movies, so they influence the lighting, character modeling, direction and so on (when I make a game), but I am conscious of the fact that I am not making a movie, and my fundamental approach is to consider what can only be done in a game, including an odd sense of playfulness,” he said.

Kojima’s playfulness is evident in some of the unexpected cameos and bizarre Easter eggs you can find in his games, especially if you mess about. Check out our list of the Death Stranding 2 Easter Eggs, cheats and secrets we’ve found so far, or find out about the strange things you can make Sam do in the hotsprings.

Of course, Kojima is associated with a movie: an adaptation of Death Stranding itself, which Norman Reedus has said he’d love to star in.

Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Kojima Productions.

Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.

There’s no doubting Hideo Kojima’s devotion to the art of video games. But one question that has followed the Metal Gear master around for much of his career is “Why doesn’t he just make a movie?”. This sentiment no doubt stems from the perception that his work at both Konami and Kojima Productions has been cutscene-heavy, opting to tell stories through often-thrillingly orchestrated cinematics rather than organic gameplay design. But is this perceived notion a reality? And, more importantly, does it even matter?

Well, I’ve done some number crunching and worked out what portion of each of the mainline Metal Gear Solid games, plus the duo of Death Strandings, is cutscenes. In some cases, it’s what you’d expect. In others, not so much…

How much of each Kojima game is cutscenes?

To work out just how much of each game is cutscene, I’ve used the average time to complete a main story playthrough, sourced from How Long to Beat’s data. I’ve then taken the total runtime of each game’s cutscenes and used it to assess what percentage that runtime is of the average playthrough. The results are:

• Metal Gear Solid: 20.29% (11hr, 30m average playthrough, 2hr 20m of cutscenes)
• Metal Gear Solid 2: 23.21% (13hr average playthrough, 3hr 1m of cutscenes)
• Metal Gear Solid 3: 26.35% (16hr average playthrough, 4hr 13m of cutscenes)
• Metal Gear Solid 4: 40.63% (18hr 30m average playthrough, 7hr 31m of cutscenes)
• Metal Gear Solid 5: 8.13% (45hr 30m average playthrough, 3hr 42m of cutscenes)
• Death Stranding: 15.75% (40hr 30m average playthrough, 6hr 22m of cutscenes)
• Death Stranding 2: 15.97% (37hr 40m average playthrough*, 6hr 1m of cutscenes)

It is important to note that this percentage relates to cinematic cutscenes only. Codec calls or other such in-game conversations are not included, as they require some player interactivity to progress.

*average playthrough based on data from multiple IGN editors.

What do those percentages reveal about Kojima’s career?

It turns out that the original three Metal Gear Solid games follow a similar trend – cutscenes make up around 20-ish percent of the overall playtime, with each subsequent entry gradually contributing to a very slight upward trajectory. It’s with Metal Gear Solid 4 that things really shift. With 40% of it being cinematics, it’s not too far from the truth to say Guns of the Patriots is half cutscenes. Understandably, the game has become the poster child for Kojima’s cinematic indulgence, something only emphasised by length – the story famously crescendoes in a 71 minute-long final cinematic. That’s just 10 minutes shorter than the 1995 animated film Toy Story.

The same can’t be said for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, however. A game with a troubled development path to say the least, it suffers from the exact opposite issue as MGS 4: a paper-thin story. With just under 4 hours of cutscenes in 45 hours of gameplay, it’s a starkly low ratio by comparison to its predecessors. MGS 5 is undoubtedly one of the greatest stealth games ever made from a mechanical perspective, but its lack of narrative throughline (and, to be honest, ending) prevents it from feeling like a full Kojima package.

And then we have the Death Stranding games, which feature runtimes akin to The Phantom Pain, but a cutscene percentage closer to that of the first Metal Gear Solid. The result is a duology of games that feel more narratively complete than MGS 5, but not as trapped by cinematic ambition as Kojima’s more indulgent projects.

Are there too many cutscenes in Kojima’s games?

With all that data crunching out the way, let’s address the real question: is Kojima too reliant on cutscenes? I think the answer lies in each individual project, or at the very least each era of his career.

Across the original Metal Gear Solid trilogy, between a fifth and a quarter of each game is cinematics. Is being passive for that duration a problem? I’m not so sure. In the PS1 and PS2 era, telling complex stories was harder to do in player-controlled scenarios, and so that’s where cinematics, codec calls, or lengthy dialogue sequences came into play. The first three Metal Gear Solid games were lauded during their time, and are still revered, for their cinematic approach to presentation, and those early trips through Shadow Moses, Big Shell, and Soviet forests flowed beautifully. They told their tales through a healthy amount of cutscenes, yes, but never at the cost of gameplay, which ushered in never-before-seen approaches to stealth-action and many experimental fourth-wall-breaking surprises. They were cutscene-heavy, but never at the expense of the game itself.

That unquestionably changes with Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. 7 hours and 31 minutes of it is spent idly watching cinematics that play out on either side of its linear stealth corridors and boss battles. Kojima had a grand story he wanted to tell, with multiple threads that needed tying up from across the trilogy that preceded it, but this arguably came at the cost of the game itself. The story isn’t necessarily a bad one, it just all-too-frequently interrupts the stealth-action we all desire from one of Snake’s adventures. And often they can be excessively lengthy – I’ve already mentioned the longer-than-a-movie finale, but the cutscenes that bridge one act to another often feature TV show-like runtimes.

Things go in the complete opposite direction with Metal Gear Solid 5, and while some of that can be blamed on its fraught development cycle, much of its reduced cutscene percentage is down to the switch from linear to open world design. This expanded vision aligned with “modern” game development trends in 2015, as massive maps full of opportunity were all the rage in a post-Skyrim world. Crucially, though, the open worlds developed around that time by studios like Bethesda, CD Projekt Red, and even Ubisoft were packed with narrative elements, both at small and large scale, made up of a combination of environmental storytelling, companion conversations, and cutscenes. Kojima didn’t subscribe to this formula, though, perhaps through a stubborn adherence to his traditional methods of sectioning off gameplay from story. But that big open world meant that more time was spent in active gameplay scenarios, and few individual missions in The Phantom Pain actually progress the plot as you play through them. The main story is told largely via cutscenes delivered as part of your trips back to Mother Base, and your time there is much more limited than your time in the field. This approach is simultaneously very Kojima, but oddly removed from the storytelling complexities we’d come to expect in 2015. It’s a fantastic game, but less so when viewed purely through a narrative lens, and the noticeably low number of cutscenes reflects this.

Heading into 2019’s Death Stranding, it may not have been a surprise to see Kojima head back to his roots when it comes to story construction. Sam Porter Bridges’ tale is told predominantly through cutscenes, and rarely during any of the many, many deliveries he’s asked to do. There’s the odd exception – Higgs planting a bomb in his cargo that he has to quickly dispose of, for example – but for the most part, story is reserved for hologram chatter (Death Stranding’s answer to codec calls) and beautifully rendered cinematics.

Both Death Stranding games are of a similar length to The Phantom Pain but, crucially, they don’t feel anywhere near as narratively sparse. The core gameplay, in which you connect various cities around a continent via delivering items and extending the internet-like “Chiral Network,” may not act as a direct vehicle for the story, but your mission goals never feel entirely divorced from the themes of human contact in a digital age. And so while the majority of the plot is therefore still told via cutscenes, as was the case way back in 1998 for Kojima on the original Metal Gear Solid, everything in between still feels narratively richer than it does in Metal Gear Solid 5.

Kojima’s effect on single-player stories

We’ve seen that the ratio of cutscenes can vary significantly across Kojima’s library, but how does his work compare to other studios working in similar spaces? Metal Gear Solid did, afterall, practically shape what modern-day PlayStation would become. We can see the impact of its legacy in many single-player, story-focused games – a recent prime example would be The Last of Us Part 2. 15.55% of its average playtime consists of non-interactive cinematic cutscenes, a percentage incredibly close to both Death Stranding games. Similarly, Grand Theft Auto 5, another open-world game with cinematic aspirations, is 12.5% cutscene on an average playthrough.

In both The Last of Us Part 2 and GTA 5, there feels like there’s a lot more story going on between cutscenes compared to Kojima’s games. Characters are constantly conversing to build out each other’s backstories, and radios chatter away to paint pictures of their worlds. But this constant noise can be overwhelming, and frankly, wouldn’t suit the worlds of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding at all. Both are built around protagonists that work in isolation – deep behind enemy lines, or trekking on a lonesome delivery path. This solitude, which enables stretches of reflection and contemplation, are what make these worlds – particularly that of Death Stranding – so singular to wander. The thought of story being injected simply to speed up the flow of its delivery feels counterintuitive. You don’t embody Sam Porter Bridges expecting an audiobook. Instead you get something of a therapeutic white noise machine that plays in between new chapter milestones.

So, should Kojima “just make a movie”? No. He’s created some of the most engaging worlds and unique mechanical gameplay experiences, both of which have helped shape the entire medium. We’d all be much poorer without his contributions. Should he be less reliant on cinematic cutscenes, or incorporate story into his missions? Perhaps. But his approach has worked well enough for me so far, and I don’t think a couple of blips 10-15 years ago should change my perspective on that. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach manages to tell a highly engaging story in only the way Kojima knows how, and I wouldn’t want him following a trend at the risk of receiving anything less interesting.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.