The Boys showrunner wants to team up with Hideo Kojima to make a game

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Kojima was apparently thinking about something similar anyway, so it only makes sense.

The Boys - Homelander
(Image credit: Amazon)

The showrunner and lead villain of Amazon's superhero spoof series The Boys are eager to have it made into a videogame—and they want none other than Metal Gear and Death Stranding mastermind Hideo Kojima to make it happen.

The idea came up over the weekend, when Kojima revealed that he'd actually been conceptualizing a dark superhero game of his own, but opted to shelve it after seeing The Boys. 

"I watched a few episodes that were delivered at the time when I was about to start a project that I had been warming up for a long time, and put it on hold because the concept was similar (different settings and tricks)," he tweeted. "A buddy (male/female) thing with a special detective squad facing off against legendary heroes behind the scenes. I was thinking of Mads as the lead."

Kojima clarified what he had in mind in a follow-up tweet, writing, "Today, when superheroes continue to be mass-produced in the entertainment industry, this drama was to be a radical hard-boiled action film, neither hero nor villain, with an astonishingly black joke setup and a worldview that is the opposite of what we are used to."

It sounds like an excellent idea, and it attracted the attention of none other than Eric Kripke, the showrunner for The Boys. "Please come make a #TheBoys game," Kripke tweeted in response to Kojima. "We can team up and conquer! Huge fan, btw."

And in response to that, Anthony Starr, who plays chief lunatic bad guy Homelander on the show, tweeted, "Second that notion."

Kojima hasn't responded to Kripke or Starr yet, and the likelihood of Kojima taking on a licensed Amazon game seems extremely remote at best: He is apparently already working on a new Death Stranding, for one thing, and Amazon has its own game development studio anyway. But the idea of a Boys game headed up by a proven creator who's not afraid to get weird has some serious potential, and if Kojima was already thinking about something like that anyway, well—dare to dream, I suppose.

Alas, Kojima said in a later tweet that he's since watched a few more episodes of The Boys, and also seemed to put a little more distance between the show and what he had in mind. "The concept was the same, a black 'anti-hero; story in which a superhero and a human face off," he tweeted. "But the setting, gimmicks, and tone were very different from what I had in mind for my previous project."

Thanks, Gamerant. 

Andy Chalk
Andy Chalk
US News Lead

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.