Earlier this evening, during a part of the currently running Sydney Film Festival, Hideo Kojima took the stage with his friend, collaborator and well known movie director George Miller for their ‘Hideo Kojima and George Miller in Conversation’ talk where the pair discussed cinema, interactive art and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.
Travelling all the way to Sydney as part of the Death Stranding World Strand Tour 2, it was only fitting that during the discussion, Kojima was asked to further elaborate on his decision to have Australia be a primary location for the sequel.
Kojima had the following to say when he was asked:
Why did you choose Australia? I’m curious about what drew you to the setting?
Well because I love George [Miller], I think Australia is the centre of the world. [laughs]That’s a joke.
DS1 was the North America continent, and you connect from East to West. It’s like I kind of did the pioneer era of the US. And I wanted to do the same for DS2, but South America is too long, Africa is running North to South, Eurasia is just too big of a mass so I thought Australia could be a good size. And also it has a lot of nature. Mountains, rivers, deserts. And the biggest was Australia has a distinctive biosphere in a way. They have marsupials, and marsupials have like pockets in their stomach right? It’s like Sam’s BB pod, that’s the same thing basically. It’s seriously what I thought.
And also George is in it [laughs] and everything went well. I’m very happy with it.
While going on to answer a further question, Kojima looped back to provide further details on the setting, stating:
Another reason I selected Australia was that I thought I could got to Australia and do location scouting. But because of the pandemic, I couldn’t do it. It was all done remote.
And I looked up a lot of animals and plants. We have so many animals in the game. And I went to the zoo this morning and I saw a really famous bird, but I realised that they don’t live in a certain area in the game. So I’m sorry, that’s a little mistake by me.
So it appears that we may be spotting some Emu or Cassowaries in areas they may not typically be found when we actually get to take Sam across Australia.
Thankfully, we don’t have to wait to much longer to see Kojima’s interpretation of Australia in the game as Death Stranding 2: On the Beach launches on June 26th for PlayStation 5.
You can check out the game’s most recent trailer below:
