One of the things I grappled with while enjoying Death Stranding 2 was that, as a long-time non-enjoyer of Hideo Kojima games, I'd always found the cult of personality surrounding the man and his works to be a little off-putting.
Luke Plunkett
There are loads of very famous video game designers, some of them even bordering on qualifying as household names, but the way some fans carried on about Kojima would have you thinking he'd won everything from an Oscar to the Nobel Prize for Literature just for making some games about guns and politics.
None of that is his fault! It always felt to me like the result of certain Gamers being desperate to be able to claim some kind, any kind, of auteur for the medium, and because he got the closest to it he was elevated to the position, like a single member of a very large mob being plucked out and hoisted up on everyone's shoulders.
Anyway, I hope those long-time Kojima stans have the capacity for some self-reflection, because in one of the most predictable news items for 2026, it turns out the guy, famous for injecting his video games with very cinematic flourishes but also notable as an absolute fiend for the latest technology, is very into experimenting with AI filmmaking. Teaming up with Death Stranding 2's Nicolas Winding Refn, the pair have made a short for a Prada commercial that, given its setting, is inexplicably made with AI.
I'm not going to post it here, but I will describe it for you: it's about two astronauts (NWR and an AI-generated man who sometimes looks like Kojima and sometimes does not) whose 50s-sci-fi-style spaceship crashes on an alien planet, where they battle with aliens before being rescued by some kind of beautiful psychic alien lady.
The entire thing looks like plastic dogshit, in the way every AI-generated video does, and the fact it's a commercial for Prada only makes it worse. Also, given the fact most of it is set in very confined spaces (the interior of a spaceship), and the rest is prompted to look like it’s tokusatsu, it probably cost more in tokens than it would have to just hire two guys and shoot them for the day!
If you're upset or disappointed in any way by this, at least you're not alone; even on Twitter the top replies look like this:
