Hideo Kojima Feet Scans Foot Fetish

2022viral videosemi-active

Hideo Kojima Feet Scans Foot Fetish is a long-running online joke about the Metal Gear and Death Stranding director scanning celebrities' bare feet into his games and supposedly having a personal foot fetish. The bit crystallized in 2022 around a viral edit of Quiet actress Stefanie Joosten reacting to her own character on-stream, and it flared back up in 2025 with Death Stranding 2.

Overview

Hideo Kojima Feet Scans Foot Fetish refers to running jokes about the Japanese game developer scanning celebrities' bare feet into his projects and, according to fan speculation, having a personal foot fetish3. The bit ties together strange in-game easter eggs, motion capture behind-the-scenes photos, and screenshots of Kojima's social media activity into edits that pop up whenever a new barefoot character shows up in his games1.

The format usually pairs Kojima's real-life photos or tweets with gameplay footage of exposed feet from Metal Gear Solid V, Death Stranding, or Death Stranding 22. Fans frame each fresh example as more evidence of his supposed obsession, treating every scanning session as another setup for the same punchline.

How It Spread

Foot fetish jokes about Kojima started circulating around 2019. On November 19, 2019, YouTuber Felice uploaded a Death Stranding clip pointing out an easter egg where zooming in on Sam's feet during a cutscene reveals a black-goo monster with Kojima-style glasses grabbing them3. Screenshots claiming Kojima was liking foot-related posts on Twitter started making rounds by 2021.

The bit really took off on September 15, 2022, when YouTuber coresmos cut Joosten's on-stream feet-scan reaction into a shareable meme edit that pulled in more than 250,000 views over the next three years1. Weeks later, on October 8, 2022, Kojima himself posted two photos of a barefoot Elle Fanning inside a motion capture rig, which passed 59,000 likes4. On July 17, 2023, X user @TopGyaru shared a screenshot of Kojima allegedly retweeting anime foot art, and the same image hit 2,900 upvotes when it was reposted to r/SummerTimeRendering that December5.

Death Stranding 2 gave the joke a second wind in 2025. On May 19, X user @VTuberFeetFan reposted the coresmos edit alongside DS2 footage of Hololive VTuber Pekora's cameo, joking about whether Kojima had done the same for her, and hit 3,400 likes in a month3. An Instagram edit by ya.kihito on June 9 pulled in 49,000 likes in four days6, and on June 12 a Reddit user shared a comment thread under the 2022 Elle Fanning photo to r/DeathStranding for over 1,500 upvotes in a day2.

How to Use This Meme

Edits typically layer a photo or tweet of Kojima next to a game clip where a female character's bare feet are visible, then land the joke with a caption implying he arranged the shot on purpose. Common variants use the coresmos clip of Joosten's Quiet stream or Kojima's own motion capture photos of actresses like Elle Fanning as the setup image.

Frequently Asked Questions