Hideo Kojima's latest game, Death Stranding, released last week. Reviews have been mixed, but our critic loved it, and the game has inspired a lot of discussion. Over the weekend, director Hideo Kojima was awarded two Guinness World Records, but curiously neither of them directly relate to the new game--he's yet to collect an award for "first strand game", or "most babies in jars in a game". Instead, Kojima has been awarded for his follower counts on Twitter and Instagram, claiming two separate awards: "most followers on Twitter for a video game director" and "most followers on Instagram for a video game director".
Kojima, who has 811,600 followers on his Japanese Twitter account and a further 2,813,385 million on his English language account, tweeted out a picture of both awards after receiving them. A close up of the award shows that it specifically focuses on his English account rather than combining the two. The award is specific to his role as a director, too--Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson has 3.7 million followers.
Kojima's Instagram has 888,539 followers, according to his award, but that appears to have gone up considerably: his page now shows 918,000 followers. This is all particularly serendipitous when you consider that the "like" is a major form of currency in Death Stranding--Kojima seems to put real stock in the power of social media.
Before this, Hideo Kojima could reasonably claim some responsibility for one other Guinness World Record: the very specific "first interactive digital graphic novel for the PlayStation Portable" award, held by Metal Gear Solid: Digital Graphic Novel, which launched June 13, 2006.
|