Shinji Hirano named as new President of Kojima Productions

Shinji Hirano, a former Konami employee with over a decade of experience in senior roles at the company, has taken a new role as president at Kojima Productions, joining up with Hideo Kojima’s new games studio last month in November.

Hirano worked as both the European and American president at Konami during his tenure, before being moved into a senior role with Konami’s sales division back in Tokyo a year before he left the company in 2016. He was one of the key outward facing members of staff for Konami, regularly seen as a spokesperson for them in the media and he’d even hosted a few of their E3 conferences. Now he’s followed in the footsteps of the company’s most famous Alumni and moved to Kojima’s new company, where his role — according to his Linkedin — will involve "managing extremely talented creative teams as one single entity and providing the leadership to make company successful as one of the greatest creative studios in the world.”

Kojima is currently working on the off-the-wall Death Stranding, unseen outside of trailers starring multiple Hollywood actors in a series of bizarre situations that could share some DNA with P.T, the Silent Hills game Kojima was working on at Konami shortly before his controversial departure.

Hirano and Kojima aren’t the only Konami veterans to have settled at Kojima Productions. Producer Ken-Ichiro Imaizumi, Concept Artist Yoju Shinkawa and Kojima’s personal assistant Ayako Terashima all move the move when Kojima Productions was first formed, while Jackie Tan, best known for his work as a level designer on Metal Gear Solid V, joined the company in January of this year.