Gaming: Kojima doing homework for ‘scariest horror’ game; Halo inspired Cybertruck & more

With Death Stranding finally in players’ hands, you just knew that director Hideo Kojima wouldn’t be able to keep his hands idle for long. The Metal Gear creator and all-around master of dystopian sci-fi weirdness appears to have an idea what type of game he wants to make next — and it’s the kind that could keep us up at night.

Tweeting that he’s already doing his homework so he can tackle something new, Kojima said his heart’s set on the horror genre, and that he’s diving into the creepiest of the creepy so he can make “the scariest horror game” by first watching “scary movies in order to awaken my horror soul.” 

For anyone still stung that all we got out of the canceled Silent Hills horror project was the much-praised appetizer P.T. (literally “Playable Teaser”), Kojima’s possible return to horror has to sound wickedly good. Silent Hills was set to team Kojima with Guillermo del Toro as a creative collaborator (del Toro contributed on P.T.’s direction as well), and would likely have featured Norman Reedus before he instead went on to become everyone’s favorite cross-continental courier in Death Stranding. 

Although Kojima’s departure from Konami left Silent Hills to wither, it’s clear he’s tapping the same source of inspiration for whatever he appears to be cooking up next. In the meantime, there’s creepiness enough peppered throughout Death Stranding, which you can pick up now for PlayStation 4.

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Do you still find yourself occasionally wishing you could hop aboard your own real-life Warthog and tear across the landscape like Master Chief himself? Apparently Elon Musk does, because he recently cited the Halo series’ durable space ATV as one of the big inspirations (in addition to 1970s-vintage 007) for the angular, all-business look of Tesla’s futuristic Cybertruck.

Days after the smashing reveal for the next-gen electric hauler (whose prototype, incidentally, was designed to stow its own bespoke ATV in the bed), Musk dropped an unexpected response to a fun Cybertruck shout-out sent from the official Halo Twitter account. With the vehicle’s sharp-edged design drawing tons of online comparisons to everything from Blade Runner to Cyberpunk 2077 to Total Recall, Musk chimed in to let the Halo team know that he definitely had “games like Halo” in mind during Cybertruck’s development.

Warthog IRL! Sure, no one on Earth is likely to be plowing the Cybertruck through the kind of Flood the Halo-verse throws at you, but hopefully the Tesla version will at least let us blast through a pond-sized puddle or two. And who knows? Maybe Musk’s secret Mars skunkworks crew already has some cool schematics drawn up for a Halo-style ring-world martian colony.

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With only a year to go before Sony and Microsoft debut new consoles to usher in the next gaming generation, Microsoft is taking ambitious aim at the release calendar for its beefed-up stable of in-house game developers. 

In a recent interview with GamesRadar+, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty said Microsoft’s goal with its upcoming Project Scarlett platform is to make sure that new Xbox-exclusive, first-party game titles are hitting store shelves far more frequently than gamers have come to expect during the Xbox One era.

“We feel really good heading into 2020. We've got a goal of being able to deliver a game, roughly, every three to four months,” said Booty, adding that he has a good feeling about “the run-up to Project Scarlett…with our content line-up.”

Beyond announced Xbox One titles like Rare’s Everwild and Obsidian’s Grounded, both of which Booty said will be “100 percent” compatible with Project Scarlett, he remained coy when it came to naming new games on deck for the still-unnamed console's late 2020 debut — including whether Halo Infinite will be a day-one game. But with only a year remaining before Project Scarlett appears in stores, at least the answer's coming soon.