In 2018 Hideo Kojima visited Valve headquarters to talk about Death Stranding. Based on emails now public thanks to the ongoing Musk v. Altman lawsuit, Kojima and Gabe Newell seem to have hit it off, if they weren’t already buddy-buddy: after the meeting Newell promised to introduce Kojima to people at the then still-not-well-known OpenAI, and also to Elon Musk.
Musk, of course, owns SpaceX, and Kojima has well-known ambitions to go to space.
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“If I could have just one wish in my life—if I could cast a magic spell and make anything come true—without hesitation, it would be this: ‘I wish to go to space before I die.’ It doesn’t have to be anything as extravagant as a trip to the moon or Mars. I would be satisfied with only a brief orbit, just beyond Earth’s atmosphere, where I can gently brush against outer space. I would give up anything to make that wish come true: my current place as a game designer, which I’ve built up for forty-five years; I’m even prepared to throw away my family or my own life. That is how powerfully I—or rather we—yearn for the cosmos.”
