S.E.E.S.

Kojima’s name has become synonymous with cinema. His love of film is well-documented—both in and out of his games. Not only does he routinely upload movie theater selfies to his Twitter, but he’s made a habit of casting well-known actors (Kiefer Sutherland, Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, etc.) in his games. But for his Hollywood bluster, the thing that makes a Kojima game a Kojima game is more pedestrian than the movies he seeks to emulate: it’s database entries.

Kojima knows how to write believably fake encyclopedias and make them seem real, which is tougher than you think. On the one hand, they must be clinical, reflective of the pencil-pushing bureaucrats who wrote them. No purple prose here—they need to be as imaginative as a printer manual to sell them as authentic. But they also must be engrossing. They should tease you. There’s a tip-of-the-iceberg quality to Kojima’s writing that invites you to keep clicking. To keep exploring. To read more entries. To memorize more proper nouns. Which is exactly what I did when I got access to the Jordan, “the artificial intelligence-based computer set-up” in Junker HQ, during my first Snatcher session.