Recently Konami announced an entire slate of upcoming “Silent Hill” games with the famed but dormant supernatural psychological horror franchise coming back in a big way.
First, and most anticipated, is a full-blown remake of the iconic game “Silent Hill 2” being developed by Bloober Team (“The Medium,” “Layers of Fear”) for PS5 and PC, the smaller indie title “Silent Hill Townfall,” the interactive streaming series “Silent Hill Ascension,” and the next proper entry in the series “Silent Hill F” which hails from Neoboards Entertainment.
This week, producer Motoi Okamoto spoke about the franchise’s revival with IGN and says the plan is to continue into the future well past this slate with even more “unique, highly artistic, and original” games to come.
Okamoto says Konami has been trying to revive the series for some time and aimed to do so in a way that redefined the brand while also keeping it all secret. That resulted in some pitches that didn’t come to fruition, one rumored to be from “Until Dawn” and “The Quarry” developer Supermassive Games (Okamoto doesn’t confirm this). Despite these failed attempts, more are coming and they are now very open to hearing pitches:
“We’ve been talking and having discussions with many creators. Unfortunately, not all those projects got off the ground, but there should be some future announcements. The future of Silent Hill will only continue. I think what’s important about the series is that we put out titles that are unique, highly artistic, and original.
I think the number of projects we have will only continue to grow. The fact we were reviving Silent Hill was a secret until now, so we couldn’t exactly go out and yell, ‘Hey, everyone! Bring us your Silent Hill projects!’ We can do that now, so if creators from around the world who love Silent Hill bring us their pitches, I promise to look through every one of them. We’re all ears.”
Okamoto indicates a return to the roots of the franchise is how the game series aims to stick out in the modern era, which is why the “Silent Hill 2” remake was born – it’s about carving out the franchise’s identity as “true psychological horror”:
“When you ask people what true psychological horror is, just about everyone will tell you Silent Hill 2. We decided that if the brand’s identity is true psychological horror, we needed to start by remaking Silent Hill 2. There were, of course, some people inside the company who thought it would be better to start with 1, but I wanted to start this project with something that symbolizes this identity.”
The center of this revival is the “Silent Hill 2” remake, with Masahiro Ito returning to the series and aiming to make the combat “more fun” without changing the original intent, even as they are remaking enemy AI from the ground up. Series composer Akira Yamaoka is re-recording and remaking the original’s music to “heighten” the feelings players had in the original.
More from this interview series can be found at IGN.
