Tokyo (AFP)

D-Day for the global community of "gamers" who has been watching for years the intriguing "Death Stranding", a game that comes out Friday and that resembles its creator, the very cinephile Hideo Kojima.

This 56-year-old Japanese is so far best known for having created the successful "Metal Gear" franchise, a pioneer of so-called stealth action games, consisting in accomplishing a mission by emphasizing discretion and strategy, even if direct combat is not absent.

Kojima grew up in a family passionate about the seventh art, whose ritual was to see a film together every night, with a predilection for Westerns, European feature films and horror films.

"I was not allowed to go to bed until the end of the film: it was the opposite of what most children know," he told The Guardian in 2012.

From the age of ten, his parents encouraged him to go to the cinema alone, paying him his ticket on the condition that he tells them after his impressions of the film.

At the university in the early 1980s, he first opted for studies in economics, for lack of having found a way to work in the world of cinema, before turning to video games, which he immediately press the possible connections with his first passion.

But this choice of career is not obvious at the time. His mother supports him, not his friends, who call him crazy. He then decided to enter Konami, thinking that this company, which was then the only publisher of video games listed on the stock exchange in Japan, would confer a certain social status.

- "Very inclined to loneliness" -

In 1987, a year after joining Konami, his first "Metal Gear" was released in Japan. The adventures of his hero, the elite soldier Solid Snake, will experience many sequels, including "Metal Gear Solid" in 1998, the first of the series to be exported. It will be a huge success both commercial and critical.

From "Metal Gear", Hideo Kojima develops the cinematic dimension of his games, which will become his trademark.

Still, the violence and images with sexual or even sexist connotations appearing sometimes in his games have earned him criticism, damaging his image as a genius creator.

In 2015, he left Konami to run his studio Kojima Productions independently.

Numerous speculations surrounded his departure, some evoking in particular the almost obsessive desire of the creator to control from A to Z the production of his games.

But this risky decision was not easy to take: his family was against, and banks reluctant to lend him money, despite its strong international reputation, Hideo Kojima told the media.

For the past three years, he has been celebrated as a rock star every time he appeared in the world's biggest video game shows, from the E3 in Los Angeles to the Tokyo Game Show and the Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. nebulae of his new project Death Stranding, designed for the PlayStation 4.

For this game with cinematic accents even more marked - actors Norman Reedus ("Walking Dead"), Lea Seydoux ("The Life of Adele", "007 Specter") and Mads Mikkelsen ("Casino Royale") lend their faces to Main characters - Hideo Kojima explains that he was inspired by world political news, such as the Donald Trump wall project on the Mexican border and Brexit.

But also more personal elements: "I am very inclined to loneliness I think that there are people like me in the world, especially among the fans of video games (...). the feeling of being integrated into society or their surroundings, "he said in a recent interview with the BBC.

Death Stranding is a game about human connections, where the player has to connect isolated agglomerations and a fragmented society in a hostile world. "So when these people play this game, they will realize that people like them exist around the world," hopes its creator.

"Knowing that even if I'm alone, there are other people like me, it feels good".

© 2019 AFP