Hideo Kojima shared some interesting information about the development of his new horror game for Xbox: he invited Xbox boss Phil Spencer and other members of the Microsoft gaming team to a traditional Japanese purification ceremony.
This was revealed during Kojima’s long-awaited return to YouTube’s HideoTube, during which he briefly spoke about OD, also called Overdose. Kojima declined to reveal anything significant about the game, but said information would be revealed “gradually.”
Anyway, what’s more interesting is that he immediately showed a photo with Spencer and Xbox President Sarah Bond and explained that due to OD’s nature, he joined them in Oharai’s cleansing ceremony, presumably to cleanse the game and ward off evil spirits.
The photo appears to have been taken from a phone, but you can still pretty clearly see Spencer, Bond and Kojima wearing a ceremonial belt with Japanese text printed along it.
“You know how, before making horror or drama films, people go to Oharai Temple?” – Kojima said. “It’s a scary game, so we held an Oharai ceremony with Microsoft.”
According to Wikipedia, Oharai, also spelled Oharae, is a ritual traditionally performed every two years to purify a large group of people for a reason. In this case, Kojima strongly suggests that this was done to clean up his OD collaboration project with Xbox, which is a very strange-looking horror game that could probably be cleaned up somehow.
While we didn’t learn much about OD from the video, we do know that it explores the nature of fear and blurs the lines between video game and film, something Kojima is increasingly leaning into.