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Themes
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Kojima has been noted for predicting and exploring themes in his works years before they gained mainstream notoriety on numerous occasions, ranging from the sociological to the scientific.[177]

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was released on November 13, 2001. While the game received universal acclaim upon release for its gameplay and attention to detail, the plot was a divisive topic among critics, with some calling it "absurd" and "stupid".[178] Reinterpretations of the game's plot began to surface in the 2010s, with some calling it "misunderstood" in its time, eerily prescient, and "necessary for the political climate to come" for predicting some of the cultural issues of the 2010s with striking accuracy and similar concepts.[179][180] GamesRadar+ has cited the prescience of the game in relation to the FacebookCambridge Analytica data scandal and the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.[181] The concept of "Selection for Societal Sanity" presented in the game was one of the bases for the paper Filtration Failure: On Selection for Societal Sanity written by Adrian Mrz and published in the academic journal Kultura i Historia.[182]

In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, released on September 1, 2015, the Wolbachia bacteria is used to halt the reproduction of the fictional "vocal cord parasites". At the time, large-scale uses of Wolbachia to control insect-transmitted diseases like malaria and dengue only existed in simulated computational models and field-test releases in Australia.[183][184] Deployment of Wolbachia was proposed the next year at the peak of the Zika epidemic in the Americas.[183] Large-scale deployments of the Wolbachia bacteria became the most effective way to control and eradicate mosquito-related epidemics as of 2019, with successful deployments in Malaysia,[185] Singapore,[186] Sri Lanka,[187] Indonesia, Vietnam, and Brazil.[188]

Kojima's Death Stranding, released on November 8, 2019, presents a post-apocalyptic setting in which people live isolated in cities and prepper shelters, unable to go outside because of the hazardous conditions brought on by an event named the "Death Stranding". The inhabitants of the world rely on "porters", people who risk their lives making deliveries, to receive and exchange the resources they need to survive. Similarities with the COVID-19 pandemic were noted by numerous journalists in early 2020, including the game's focus on the themes of isolation, loneliness, and political divide.