Kojima says nearly everyone thought OD was impossible to make

Nearly everyone Hideo Kojima pitched OD to came back with the same answer: the horror project was too strange, too unclear, and too hard to believe in. That reaction says as much about AAA publishing right now as it does about Kojima himself. OD is still one of the most secretive big-budget games in development, but the story around it has already become a case study in how hard it is to get an ambitious, auteur-led idea funded when publishers are built to favor sequels, known brands, and safer production plans.

Kojima said he first came up with the OD concept years ago while making the original Death Stranding, which puts the project in the long shadow of one of his last major reinventions. He described pitching it to many companies, including both major publishers and up-and-coming ones, and said every one of them gave him the same reaction: they called him crazy and said they did not understand the concept or believe it could be done. That resistance is part of why OD has taken on such mythic status. In a market where publishers increasingly manage risk through service models and franchise continuity, a game built around fear itself, and around how a player keeps going when the tension becomes too much, is exactly the kind of pitch that gets stuck at the whiteboard.

OD was officially announced at The Game Awards on December 7, 2023, as a collaboration between Kojima Productions and Xbox Game Studios. Xbox said the project would explore players’ fear thresholds and blur the line between games and film, and the teaser named Jordan Peele as one of the storytellers while introducing Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and Udo Kier as the lead cast. That lineup made the project look less like a conventional horror game than a hybrid experiment built to test how far a major platform holder would go for a creator with a singular vision.

Kojima has only sharpened that sense of uncertainty since then. In December 2025, he said he did not know whether OD would work out and said the team was trying to change the service model from the ground up. A separate report said the SAG-AFTRA video-game actors strike pushed filming into 2026, and Kojima said he wanted to scan a ghost into the game. The corporate backdrop has also shifted: on February 20, 2026, Microsoft named Asha Sharma the new CEO of Microsoft Gaming after Phil Spencer retired, and Sharma later called OD a “deeply moving game” and “another kind of game.” That is the real meaning of Kojima’s impossible pitch. OD is not just a weird horror project. It is a stress test for how much invention a major publisher will still tolerate when the safest business model is to say no.