What do you do when you’re a legendary game dev, pushing 60, and suddenly brush shoulders with the Grim Reaper during a pandemic? If you’re Hideo Kojima, you don’t retire quietly into the sunset or start writing your memoirs about polygon counts—no, you boot up your operating system of madness and start planning for beyond the grave.

In a move that’s equal parts genius and sci-fi thriller, the Metal Gear mastermind has revealed that he’s literally handed over a USB stick full of game concepts to his assistant—as a kind of digital will. That’s right. Kojima Productions now has a “Break Glass In Case Of Kojima’s Death” drive, packed with ideas presumably ranging from the philosophical to the downright deranged.

While turning 60 might’ve sounded like the cue for Kojima to buy a lawn chair and sit in his garden pondering the meaning of stealth mechanics, it was actually the pandemic-era health scare that shook him harder than a boss fight with Psycho Mantis.

He fell seriously ill, needed eye surgery, and for the first time, he actually felt his age. Mortality loomed large—and suddenly, the idea of time not being infinite clicked. “How many years do I have left to make games or films?” he mused. “Ten, maybe?”

So instead of slowing down, the man accelerated. Like Snake chugging a ration mid-battle, Kojima bounced back with a renewed sense of urgency.

The Kojimaverse Must Go On

Now he’s juggling more projects than a speedrunner abuses glitches:

• Death Stranding 2
• OD (that weirdly cryptic Xbox game)
• And Physint, a “next-gen action-espionage” title he’s building with Sony, for fans who still miss sneaking through cardboard boxes.

Why this sudden burst of creative chaos? It’s not just legacy—it’s insurance. Kojima wants Kojima Productions to live on, even without him around to whisper enigmatic plot twists into existence.

“I gave a USB stick with all my ideas on it to my personal assistant,” he told Edge. “Perhaps they could continue to make things after I’m gone… I don’t want them to just manage our existing IP.”

Because in Kojima’s mind, dying without creating something bizarre and brilliant one last time is a fate worse than death.

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He did consider branching out into film, especially with friends like Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn in his contact list (both of whom cameo in Death Stranding, because of course they do). But even they told him to stick with games. Which says a lot, considering they’ve built careers on unsettling surrealism.

Kojima Is Planning His Afterlife… In Game Dev Form

While most people worry about pensions and writing wills, Kojima’s planning to haunt the games industry via a USB stick of unfiltered imagination. Because death may come for all, but Hideo Kojima’s ideas? They’re built to outlast him.

Whether this results in future masterpieces or Frankenstein-level oddities cobbled together by brave devs unzipping a folder called “kojima_final_real_final3.docx”… only time will tell.

But if there’s one thing we’ve learnt from this man, it’s this: Expect the unexpected—even from beyond the veil.