Hideo Kojima Has Been Awarded Two Guinness World Records, But Not For What You Might Expect

Hideo Kojima's latest game, Death Stranding, released last week. Reviews have been mixed, but our critic loved it, and the game has inspired a lot of discussion. Over the weekend, director Hideo Kojima was awarded two Guinness World Records, but curiously neither of them directly relate to the new game--he's yet to collect an award for "first strand game", or "most babies in jars in a game".

Instead, Kojima has been awarded for his follower counts on Twitter and Instagram, claiming two separate awards: "most followers on Twitter for a video game director" and "most followers on Instagram for a video game director".

Kojima, who has 811,600 followers on his Japanese Twitter account and a further 2,813,385 million on his English language account, tweeted out a picture of both awards after receiving them. A close up of the award shows that it specifically focuses on his English account rather than combining the two. The award is specific to his role as a director, too--Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson has 3.7 million followers.

Kojima's Instagram has 888,539 followers, according to his award, but that appears to have gone up considerably: his page now shows 918,000 followers. This is all particularly serendipitous when you consider that the "like" is a major form of currency in Death Stranding--Kojima seems to put real stock in the power of social media.

Before this, Hideo Kojima could reasonably claim some responsibility for one other Guinness World Record: the very specific "first interactive digital graphic novel for the PlayStation Portable" award, held by Metal Gear Solid: Digital Graphic Novel, which launched June 13, 2006.