At long last, Conan O’Brien is a video game character. Despite spending decades creating a richly detailed Conan universe—filled with a colorful, varied cast of characters that seems perfectly suited to a sprawling role-playing game—we’ve never been graced with a fully interactive take on the late night show host. That has now finally changed thanks to Conan’s unexpected guest appearance in the upcoming, Hideo Kojima-led Death Stranding.
Conan announced his part in the game through a video showing his visit to Kojima Productions’ offices. After playing around with a bunch of Kojima’s action figures—a collection that includes, naturally enough, a doll made in the game designer’s likeness—and watching a Death Stranding trailer (“Oh my god. What’s wrong with you?” Conan asks), the pair head to a 3D scanner set-up and capture the late night host’s likeness.
Kojima tweeted a clip of virtual Conan in action, helpfully explaining that the O’Brien-supplied Sea Otter Suit allows you to “swim easily in the river” and cheer up the jar baby strapped to digital Norman Reedus’ chest.
These gameplay benefits all make a certain kind of sense when you see the context of Conan’s guest appearance, which involves him as a holographic man who wears an otter head as a hat, makes bad jokes about his brother also being a member of the “weasel family,” and gives the player a copy of his headwear so that they can float in water better.
Learning all of this may introduce more confusion about what, exactly, Death Stranding is about, but, as Kojima also tweeted this morning, there’s really only one question from Conan’s video game debut to be concerned with:
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