After many rumors in advance, Hideo Kojima finally got down to business at the Game Awards at the end of last week and officially announced Death Stranding 2. The sequel originally had a completely different story than it does now – because because of the corona pandemic, the cult developer completely rewrote it.
The story of the now confirmed sequel Death Stranding 2 could actually have been completely different than the one you are finally given. There is a very specific reason for this – and of course it’s not a good one: the corona pandemic.
While that pandemic in the gaming area primarily caused numerous shifts, simply because there were countless delays in the development process, this has a completely different consequence in the specific case of Death Stranding 2. According to Kojima, the plot for the sequel was actually finished before the pandemic started in 2020.
Kojima joked that he probably predicted the future too well with the first Death Stranding or hit the developments in the real world too well – and he probably didn’t want to go into the game industry as Nostradamus and ultimately “avoid the… to predict the future again”.
“Well, I had already written the whole storyline before the pandemic, but after experiencing the pandemic I rewrote the whole thing, the whole story from scratch. I just didn’t want to predict any more of the future, so that’s why I revised it,” Kojima elaborates.
More often than not, elements of a sci-fi story would end up at least partially embracing and partially predicting real-world developments; this is certainly also due to the fact that sci-fi plots develop trends and concepts from reality. Kojima didn’t necessarily hide his obsession for this in the past either, as he confirms in his book “The Creative Gene”. For example, he is also considered a big fan of the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”, which picked up trends in space travel and AI very early on.
Ironically, for example, Kojima had already appropriately taken up today’s future in 2001 with his hit Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. It was partly about how information is disseminated in a modern world, including cultural and social trends. The attainment of political freedom in the information age was already ubiquitous back then. In this respect, it can be viewed with interest in which direction Death Stranding 2 is now going after the reorientation.