Instead of announcing what their next game is, they revealed how Ludens (or LUDENS…), the mascot figure of the studio, was initially meant to be a ballet dancer.

The studio celebrates its fifth anniversary, and they released a Q&A with Yoji Shinkawa, the artist of the Metal Gear Solid series, Death Stranding, and… Left Alive. „When we first started to create the company’s logo, Mr Kojima brought up the idea of a ballet dancer jumping – as ballet is a ‘comprehensive art’, he said he wanted to achieve that digitally. But I had a hard time digesting this idea. So, one of the ideas that I proposed was a mixture of an astronaut suit and a knight from a digital world, something that Mr Kojiima had suggested in the past. Then, he added the idea of the Turing machines and the flag to this. By the end, the concept of the ballet dancer was completely gone [laughs,” Shinkawa said.

The initial knight design was more of a Metal Gear-like format, without any weapons.

„There were elements of a knight already, so I considered giving LUDENS a sword to match, but Mr Kojima said ‘we’re not going to be fighting, so I don’t want them to carry a sword or a gun but something else.’ That’s where the idea for the flag came from. I think his idea was to explore the digital world and plant a flag on its frontiers while hinting back to the first moon landing in human history. I’m sure there must have been some inspiration taken from that,” Shinkawa explained.

He then discussed the spinning gold discs around Ludens, which is a tribute to Alan Turing, a British mathematician whose work laid the foundations for modern computers. „This was a request from Mr Kojima. He wanted to have elements resembling Turing machines in the logo; to have calculator-like parts in LUDENS. Turing machines were invented by British mathematician Alan Turing, and they became the base of modern-day computers. The golden disks on LUDENS’ body are a play on this concept. So, the idea was for the suit to have calculators that would have a role similar to that of Turing machines. They search and measure various things as they spin,” he said.

It’s a pretty clever idea. Also, we now have the Cyberpunk 2077-Death Stranding collaboration in the new Kojima game.

Source: PCGamer