Death Stranding mastermind Hideo Kojima left the office after dark one night last week, tweeting just one word on the way out: "Tired." After a long and influential career in the industry stretching back to the mid-1980s, he's starting to wonder how much time he really has left.
Kojima's latest game, Death Stranding 2, doesn't have a release date yet, but it's slated to arrive sometime in 2025 and that apparently means it's time to crunch at Kojima Productions. "The most demanding period of game development—both physically and mentally—commonly known as 'crunch time'," Kojima wrote atop his initial "tired" post. "On top of mixing and Japanese voice recording, there’s an inevitable pile of other tasks: writing comments, explanations, essays, interviews, discussions, and non-game-related work. It’s incredibly tough."
