As recent leaks have shown us, it’s looking fairly likely that Konami is looking to bring us back to the world of Silent Hill. As it currently stands, it sounds like we’re getting a remake of Silent Hill 2 – generally regarded as the best one – and something new from Annapurna, maybe somewhere else. Remake, new game, it doesn’t matter. Because I honestly believe the series should just be left for dead.
Let’s go back to 1996 for a little while. It was the year the first flip phone was released, the year Dolly the sheep was born, and also when the original Silent Hill’s development began. The game’s development team, Team Silent, was made up of multiple staff members whose projects had all failed, and didn’t really fit on any particular team at Konami. Essentially, it was a last ditch effort from these developers, and one that obviously ended up succeeding.
Problem is though, as a friend recently put it to me, that first game was kind of like lightning in a bottle; the game was iterated on in the subsequent sequels that came from Team Silent, but they certainly couldn’t be described as consistent. Especially considering the various leads on the team changed over the various games, with creator Keiichiro Toyama – now working on Slitterhead – only having worked on the first game. Only the game’s composer, Akira Yamaoka, worked on all four of the first games.
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