Death Stranding creator Hideo Kojima has received an Award of Fine Arts from Japan's Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, with the success of his most recent title, Death Stranding: Director's Cut, playing a big part.

The Fine Art Awards span 11 categories including theater, film, music, dance, literature, fine arts, broadcasting, popular performing arts, promotion of arts, critique, and media arts. The accolade has been presented every year since 1950 to people who have achieved outstanding feats in various fields of the arts and who have "opened up new frontiers". The Media Arts category, though, launched in 2008 and is the newest of the 11.

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Kojima Productions made the announcement regarding the industry star via a press release while the announcement page on Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs website has confirmed the 58-year-old's award in the aforementioned category.

The decisive committee pointed to Death Stranding's dynamic interactions and praised Kojima for his approach to depicting methods transcending existing theories that can only be demonstrated in video games, beginning with his work on Metal Gear in 1987.

Kojima is only the second individual from the gaming industry to receive said award since Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, famed for his creation of some of the most popular video games in the world such as Super Mario, Donkey Kong, F-Zero, The Legend of Zelda, and Star Fox.

"This time, DEATH STRANDING DIRECTOR'S CUT, released last year, was highly acclaimed by the selection committee members and has been selected to receive the award," Kojima's announcement reads. "This is the first time that someone from the game industry has received this award in the media arts category since Shigeru Miyamoto received the Minister's Award in 2010."

Death Stranding is currently available on PlayStation 4 and PC, while Death Stranding: Director's Cut is only available for the PS5 until publisher 505 Games launches the PC version of the game on March 30, 2022. If you want to hear our thoughts on the Director's Cut, you can read our review here.

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