10 Video Game Studios Probably Founded Out Of Spite
7. Kojima Productions
The feud of “The People vs The Wrongful Imprisonment of Hideo Kojima at the Hands of Konami” is one of the gaming industry’s most long-winded stories.
The company and Metal Gear Solid director Kojima constantly clashed over the years. He was given his own studio within Konami for a time but, when Kojima Productions folded in July 2015, he was reportedly blocked from attending the Game Awards at the whims of his former employer.
Kojima Productions only stayed dormant for a few months however, as it was revealed in the December of the same year that it was being reformed as an independent studio in calibration with Sony.
In 2019, the studio released Death Stranding which was an indication in a lot of ways that Kojima was completely off the leash. Whilst Metal Gear had been a very experimental series Death Stranding is bar far the auteur’s biggest accomplishment pushing boundaries gameplay-wise and from a storytelling perspective. Regardless of whatever you think of the end result, it has to be commended for being pretty out there.
Whilst Kojima hasn’t really made a whole lot of potshots at Konami, he never really needed to as we all knew the situation from afar. The massive sales success that was Death Stranding was the only message he needed to send.