Hideo Kojima finally revealed the engine used to power his bizarre and ambitious Death Stranding during a recent PlayStation event.
The mysterious action/adventure title will run on a modified version of Guerrilla Games’ Decima engine, and fans have been keen to see just what it can do – Kojima has been only too happy to oblige, in his own strange way.
Because apparently, the best way to show off the power of the engine is to put together a replica of his studio’s board room – check it out below.
Kojima Production's meeting room reproduced by DECIMA engine that was introduced at PSX on 12/3. pic.twitter.com/vd3QxqzUr9
— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) December 12, 2016
Is Kojima’s board room usually filled with tanks and popular directors holding babies in pods? You know what – if I were a betting man, I’d say it probably is.
Kojima then got slightly more conventional (mercifully) and shared images of the Game Awards 2016 trailer, just to prove it was in-engine footage, unlike the E3 2016 reveal, which was not.
This ones are the background shots from the teaser trailer running by DECIMA engine introduced at PSX. Only the lighting and the texture. pic.twitter.com/bpxgkyiEny
— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) December 12, 2016
Oh, and for any Hannibal fans out there, have a gander at the character model for Mads Mikkelsen’s sinister solider character.
Kojima refers to him as ‘precious, even without texture’, which is kind of adorable.
To Mads-fan,
Here's Mads w/ lighting & w/o texture that only our dev team can see.
He's so precious even w/o texture.
I'll keep coming. pic.twitter.com/lJbSya9VDM— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) December 12, 2016
Finally, Kojima described the process of how he came to settle on Guerrilla’s Decima Engine in typically eccentric fashion.
In a series of Tweets, he said:
The space development competition has been stagnated after the Cold War. Due to the steep rise in price of space development cost, the investment for the earth has been strengthened and they gave up on the space shuttle program. Meanwhile I who wants to proceed myself to the moon, met the guerrilla whose plan was to go to the mars. We decided to make the rocket by reforming their engine. And by doing so it enables us to go to the mars but even to the jupiter.
Death Stranding is still a long way off being ready, but I hope to God somebody is filming a making-of documentary, because this is one time where I’d kill to see how the sausage gets made.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.