Hideo Kojima has been celebrating the recent Death Stranding PC launch and he's taken this time to reflect on his early gaming history. What's more, he's gotten a super-cool shout-out from the Cyberpunk 2077 devs in the form of some very stylish art.
"I can say the Famicom back then changed my life," Kojima began on Twitter.
"The [first] Famicom game I bought was Urban Champion," he continued. "There's no console anywhere so I had to look at the phonebook and call the stores around. The toy shop in Minoo said to me 'if you can come I will sell it to you' so I drove to Minoo and ended up buying the bundle package."
Urban Champion was the first 2D fighting game for Nintendo, originally released for the Japan-exclusive Famicom console in 1984. It later made its way to the Nintendo Entertainment System on the West. Currently, it is available on the Nintendo eShop as a Nintendo 3DS '3D Classics' title, and its arcade version is available as an Arcade Archives title on the Nintendo eShop for Nintendo Switch.
"I was so happy saying 'playing videogame at home is unbelievable!'" Kojima concluded. "On the next day I bought Pinball, then I go to the toyshop, Kiddyland in Umeda to buy games after my part time job(video shooting for the wedding). I was in college, I used to skip the class and play the Famicon."
Hideo Kojima Gets a Cyberpunk 2077 Shout-Out
Kojima's tales of his early Famicom days is certainly nostalgic to the people who saw video games make the transition from arcades to home systems. The latter part about skipping class to play video games is also rather familiar to some of us here and perhaps to you as well.
His reflections on his early days with gaming is certainly heartwarming, but that's not the only cool thing that happened to him today. Following the release of Death Stranding on PC, the Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt RED decided to immortalize Hideo Kojima with a piece of stylish fanart based on a photograph of him taken on an iconic motorcycle from the game.
Since those early Famicom days, Hideo Kojima has grown from playing games on the Famicom to developing games for computers, and for that same console, eventually progressing into the industry heavyweight that baffles us with strange plotlines to this day.
What do you think of Hideo Kojima's thoughts on the first Nintendo home console? Did you ever skip class to play video games? Let us know in the comments below!
