Hideo Kojima is a Japanese video game designer. He is regarded as an auteur of video games. He developed a strong passion for film and literature during his childhood and adolescence. In 1986, he was hired by Konami, for which he designed and wrote Metal Gear (1987) for the MSX2, a game that laid the foundations for stealth games and the Metal Gear series, his best known and most appreciated works. At Konami, he also produced the Zone of the Enders series, as well as wrote and designed Snatcher (1988) and Policenauts (1994), graphic adventure games regarded for their cinematic presentation.

An auteur is an artist with a distinctive approach, usually a film director whose filmmaking control is so unbounded and personal that the director is likened to the "author" of the film, thus manifesting the director's unique style or thematic focus. As an unnamed value, auteurism originated in French film criticism of the late 1940s, and derives from the critical approach of André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, whereas American critic Andrew Sarris in 1962 called it auteur theory. Yet the concept first appeared in French in 1955 when director François Truffaut termed it policy of the authors, and interpreted the films of some directors, like Alfred Hitchcock, as a body revealing recurring themes and preoccupations.