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Decima: how Guerrilla gave Kojima its engine on a stick

Why does Death Stranding run on Decima? How Guerrilla handed Hideo Kojima its engine's source code before any contract, named it after Dejima, and what came next.

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Hideo Kojima speaking at a GDC 2013 lectern (left) and Hermen Hulst of Guerrilla Games giving a GDC talk in 2010 (right)

In December 2016, at the PlayStation Experience in San Francisco, Hideo Kojima described a gift. “When we first met Guerrilla, they gave me the source code of their engine,” he said. “Before we signed any contracts or anything, they just gave me this. It’s the treasure of Guerrilla, and them handing that to me made me feel very special.”

Guerrilla is the Amsterdam studio behind Killzone and Horizon. Its engine would carry Death Stranding and its sequel. It didn’t even have a name yet.

A tour that ended in Amsterdam

Kojima had just left Konami, and with it the in-house engines he had always worked on, including the Fox Engine created for Metal Gear Solid V. His new studio needed one. Wikipedia records that in January 2016 he and PlayStation architect Mark Cerny spent two weeks looking for a game engine for what became Death Stranding.

Guerrilla’s co-founder Hermen Hulst told the rest at the Reboot Develop conference in 2019. Kojima went around development studios to see how they worked and what technology they used. “The last stop on his trip was to The Netherlands, visiting Guerrilla Games,” VG247 reported. It was meant to be a quick visit; they ended up spending a couple of days together.

Then Hulst made an unusual call. “I was talking to Michiel v.d. Leeuw, our technical director, and said, ‘You know what, let’s just give Kojima Productions our source code on a stick and offer it to them.’” The Japanese team was baffled. “They just couldn’t believe that a studio like us would just hand that to them. They wondered why. The honest reason was just for them to make a game.”

An engine called “the engine”

Guerrilla had used its technology since Killzone: Shadow Fall in 2013, and announced in 2015 that Horizon Zero Dawn was built on it. Inside the studio it was simply the engine. Van der Leeuw explained why in the blog post that finally named it, on 24 February 2017: “We couldn’t be too concerned before, too busy making games. Besides, everybody knows that Naming Things is the number one problem in software design. But we found a new partner, and they were adamant about Doing This Right. And you need to have a name. Otherwise you can’t announce it.”

The name was Decima, after Dejima, the artificial island in Nagasaki bay. VG247 adds the history: Japan built it in 1634 for Portuguese traders, and the Dutch moved there in 1641, making it Japan’s only trading port with the rest of the world. A Dutch studio and a Japanese one could hardly have picked a better symbol. Who picked it is told two ways: Hulst says he and Kojima came up with the word together, while Wikipedia, citing Guerrilla’s executive producer Angie Smets, says Guerrilla chose it to stand for the partnership.

The same post announced “a small outpost in the form of Kojima Amsterdam” to keep the two studios working together.

To the moon, to Mars, to Jupiter

A week after the PSX panel, Kojima explained the deal in a four-tweet thread about the space race. “Meanwhile I who wants to proceed myself to the moon, met the guerrilla whose plan was to go to the mars,” he wrote. “We decided to make the rocket by reforming their engine. And by doing so it enables us to go to the mars but even to the jupiter.”

On stage he had been more direct: “The Decima Engine is very appropriate for working on open worlds.” Hulst said Guerrilla engineers then went on “missions” to Tokyo to support Kojima Productions, sometimes working inside its teams, and that those conversations made the engine better for Guerrilla too.

Death Stranding came out in November 2019. Horizon Forbidden West followed in February 2022 and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach on 26 June 2025, both on improved versions of the engine.

Ten years on

In February 2026 Kojima Productions’ chief technology officer, Akio Sakamoto, told Automaton how the arrangement works. “When we need functionality specific to our projects, we modify the engine ourselves – and in some cases, develop entirely new features. We share these updates with Guerrilla at the code level.” The two studios still meet regularly: “When we first adopted Decima, we began holding regular meetings with Guerrilla, and this practice continues today.”

He was frank about the trade-offs: “It has now been nearly ten years since we began using the engine. While no engine is the best choice in every scenario, Decima enables us to accomplish many things that would be difficult to achieve elsewhere.” For Death Stranding 2’s opening landscape, he said, the polygon count reached about 25 million.

That arrangement may now be at risk. In September 2026 Xbox took over as publisher of Kojima’s next game, PHYSINT, after Sony. PowerUp Gaming, citing Forbes, reported that Kojima Productions “may no longer have access” to the Sony-owned engine. IGN’s report on the same news was more careful: “We still don’t know which game engine Kojima Productions is using for Physint.”

Whatever happens next, the engine got its name, and its best-known partner, from source code handed over on a stick in Amsterdam. For other studios rethinking their engines, see why studios are giving up their own engines.

Sources

Checked .

  1. Kojima is using Guerrilla's Decima Engine to build Death Stranding — Game Developer
  2. Guerrilla Games co-founder tells the story of how he and Kojima arrived at the name Decima for the studio's engine — VG247
  3. Introducing Decima — Guerrilla Games
  4. Death Stranding: Hideo Kojima Talks About Using Killzone Dev's Engine — GameSpot (Internet Archive copy)
  5. We ask Kojima Productions why they've stuck to Decima for nearly ten years. Chief technology officer on what makes Death Stranding's engine irreplaceable — Automaton
  6. Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid Spiritual Successor Physint Will Now Be Published by Xbox Instead of Sony — IGN
  7. Kojima-Sony Breakup Means No Decima Engine for PHYSINT — PowerUp Gaming
  8. Decima (game engine) — Wikipedia
  9. Death Stranding — Wikipedia
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