In his 36-year career, Kojima has become one of the world’s best-known game directors – and he has never been keener to welcome fans into his world

On 8 July 2022, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was delivering a political campaign speech outside the Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara City, Japan, when a man approached and shot him in the back using a homemade firearm. Even before Abe died from his injuries, footage of the assassination had been posted online. Social media users began to speculate as to the identity and motive of the killer. On the internet forum 4chan, a site notorious for its anarchic, often hateful trolling, an anonymous user posted a photograph of the video game director Hideo Kojima, claiming this “left-wing extremist” was the perpetrator.

If the post was intended to bait the gullible, it worked. The far-right French politician Damien Rieu shared the images on Twitter, where Kojima – who has more than three million followers, and obviously had nothing to do with what happened to Shinzo Abe – began to receive dozens of accusatory messages. Rieu eventually deleted the tweet and published an apology, but not before Kojima had been identified as Abe’s killer on Greek and Iranian news channels.