It’s no exaggeration to say that Hideo Kojima, creator of the Metal Gear and Death Stranding series, has made and continues to make a huge impact on the game industry with his thought-provoking writing and genre-defining game design. However, Kojima recently revealed that there could’ve been a timeline in which none of this happened – had he not received a job offer from a medical company. In an essay for An-an Web, Kojima shared an episode from around the time he was job hunting, when an encounter with an HR director “changed his life forever.”
Kojima was a humanities student freshly graduated from what he calls a “second-rate” private university, with no experience in club activities, studying overseas and no connections. Given the circumstances, Kojima admits that for him, job hunting was far from easy. In Japan, job hunting for university graduates is a particularly tedious process – some spend years applying for companies in order to be accepted literally anywhere, and the process sometimes starts before they even graduate.
In favor of a university that would offer him better chances to land a job offer from a prominent company, Kojima had already abandoned his dreams of going to art school, but what he yearned for was creative work – and due to various life circumstances including his father’s sudden death, he decided to completely give up on his dream.
Many major companies rejected Kojima solely based on his resume, seeing that he didn’t come from a particularly “strong” university, and even if he did pass to the interview stage, he says interviewers would laugh in his face when he said he wrote novels. “Endless phone calls, mails, roaming around until the soles on my shoes wore down – my job hunting made me feel like I was a Showa era detective trying to solve a murder case,” Kojima explained. The more interviews he went through, the more he realized how none of the people applying, including himself, were actually true to themselves. “Everybody was hiding their true selves; we could only act like chameleons trying to change our colors to adapt to each of the companies we were applying for. Those days of playing pretend felt far detached from job hunting one would do to chase their dreams.”
Influenced by his parents who worked in the pharmaceutical industry, Kojima applied to numerous companies in the field, and after a long streak of rejections, he finally received a job offer from a medical equipment manufacturer. Stressed from the long period spent looking for jobs, Kojima ended up venting his true feelings – about actually wanting to work in a creative field – to the HR director who sent him the job offer. “To my surprise,” Kojima writes, “the HR director encouraged me: Kojima, I feel like you’re more fit for a creative job – so go for it.” According to Kojima, this was a major turning point in his life. Without the HR director’s honest advice, Kojima might have been silently working in the pharmaceutical industry right now.
After his encounter with the HR manager, Kojima focused on applying for jobs in the game and toy industries. “I didn’t have to lie anymore. I talked honestly about the novels I wrote, about what I had created, and I showed [the employers] my portfolio and notebooks with pitches.” Soon enough, Kojima would finally end his grueling job-hunting cycle and find himself working for Konami.
Kojima writes: “Two years after becoming a working adult, I became the one sitting at the interviewer’s desk, listening to the students’ lies. By the way, those who conduct interviews also lie – they’re representing the company, not their personal alignment. A place where lies meet lies, that’s what interviews actually are. But I’m not somebody who lies. And it’s not because I’m the representative of my company. I sincerely face each of the students who come to me. I even give advice to those who aren’t suited for the job. Just like that HR director who changed my life, whose name I’ve already forgotten.”
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