Hideo Kojima attended the SXSW festival in March 2025, holding a special panel on Kojima Production’s upcoming game Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. In one of his recent essays for An-An Web, he gave fans a glimpse of his personal life during that period – that is, multiple episodes of him being stalked by what he describes as aggressive autograph hounds. Autograph hounds or “graphers” are people who usually approach celebrities and take as many autographs from them as possible with the intent to sell them for high prices on platforms such as eBay.
Kojima starts his essay describing what awaited him at the Los Angeles International Airport when he was heading to this year’s SXSW – a group of people begging for autographs. As Kojima explains, some of them did look like actual fans, while others, according to him, didn’t fit into the profile of what he considers a “gamer.”
He noticed a lot of them were holding panels with an image of him or an MGS visual printed on them, “probably downloaded from some random internet website. All of them exactly the same.” According to Kojima, actual fans usually just ask for a picture together, not a whole bunch of autographs. That is when he realized: “These guys are no fans; they are autograph hounds.”
On the second day, he headed back to the airport to fly to Texas, with the same group of people waiting for him – now in even larger numbers. They apparently followed him all the way to the check-in counter, and he ended up succumbing to the pressure and giving his autograph to all of them.
Arriving in Texas, another group of autograph hounds was waiting for him, and this time, he refused their requests. In response the crowd turned aggressive, chasing him and complaining about how he “signed the ones in LA.”
Sometime before arriving at his hotel in Texas, he received information that a group of people was waiting for him in the lobby, so he decided to go through the back entrance. However, as soon as he opened the car door, a woman of a familiar face rushed towards him. He ran straight towards the elevator with the security guards acting as shields for him, but the woman followed him, trying to forcefully enter the elevator. “It was like I was in a Zombie movie”, he writes. Apparently, one of his security guards, an ex-special forces member nicknamed “S,” had to stay up all night guarding his room, and he stayed by Kojima’s side during the whole SXSW festival.
After SXSW had finished, Kojima headed back to LA, and, to no one’s surprise, yet another group of autograph hounds ambushed him on the other side of the boarding bridge. “S” helped ward off the self-proclaimed “fans,” and the airport staff was kind enough to offer him a VIP lounge so he could hide until his next plane arrived. He tightly hugged “S,” whom he had formed an attachment to, and they parted ways.
“Although he left the military, he is currently involved in a top-secret mission. That’s why he’s not allowed to reveal his real name or identity. We couldn’t even take a photo [together]. Of course, having conversations about personal matters was also out of the question. However, even if I forget about all the faces of those “fake fans” or the awful things they did to me – I’ll never forget him.”
