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"The very idea of making a prequel to Silent Hill wasn't good," says Origins and Shattered Memories designer: "That game told its story brilliantly through flashbacks, and there weren't really any unanswered questions"
Feature | Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories developers discuss tackling the difficult task of reinventing Silent Hill by going back to the series' roots on PSP and Wii
Definitely an interesting read about what happened behind some of the.... less favorably received titles in the series.
Some excertps:
The Silent Hill series was in a strange place in 2005. The sales of each successive entry were worse than the last, and the esoteric vision of Team Silent, the internal Konami team behind the first four games, was at odds with the trend towards more guns-out horror. By the time Silent Hill 4: The Room came out, Konami Japan had all but given up on the series, and Team Silent was disbanded.
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Around this time, long-running British studio Climax set up a Los Angeles office to tap into the lucrative West Coast games business. This move paid off, because by the end of 2005 it had penned a deal to make the next Silent Hill game – a prequel to the original Silent Hill designed for Sony's portable powerhouse.
This was great news for Climax, putting in its hands an original game in one of the great horror series. However, members of the studio's UK team, which was working on a Ghost Rider PSP game at the time, saw fundamental problems with the idea. Sam Barlow, writer and lead designer at the studio, spotted the red flags. "The very idea of making a prequel to Silent Hill wasn't good," he tells us. "That game told its story brilliantly through flashbacks, and there weren't really any unanswered questions."
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The full extent of Origins' misdirection was revealed when the LA team came to the UK seeking help. Lead artist Neale Williams recalls the state of the game, "They built all these assets for the game on an engine that never appeared. They got to a stage in development where they were having to show something and just had some internal artwork."
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"People were saying the monsters looked like something out of Scooby-Doo. It didn't look great," Sam tells us. Beyond that, it didn't fit the existing lore or haunting tone of the series. Several characters were older in the prequel than in Silent Hill, while enigmatic psychiatrist Dr Kaufmann was suddenly an authority on the ghostly goings‑on when in the original game he was still trying to understand everything.
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"In Climax LA's version, The Butcher was the origin story of Pyramid Head, who was explained as 'a chef who went insane and attached metal to his head'," Sam tells us, while Neale laughs in recollection of the terrible idea.
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Throughout all this, Climax didn't have much input from Konami Japan. "This was a thorny PR question at the time because you didn't want to say you just made this stuff up as you went along," Sam admits.
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Soon after Origins and the surprisingly successful movie, Konami approached Climax about a possible sequel. Climax boss Simon Gardner rejected the idea, believing there was little to be gained commercially or creatively from a follow-up. At this point, Konami producer William Oertel stepped in to offer Climax a sweetener: the option to create a Silent Hill remake for the Nintendo Wii, provided the studio made a PSP game too.
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While the foundations of Silent Hill are grounded in works like Jacob's Ladder and surrealism, Sam also looked to two less likely places for inspiration. "I thought of Battlestar Galactica, a reboot in which some characters had the same names but they reinvented everything," he says. "So I said, 'Why don't we do a reboot like that?' This idea of the psychiatrist interviewing the protagonist, the whole game can be a false remembering of something."
The premise of Shattered Memories was born. It would retell the Silent Hill story of Harry Mason searching for his daughter, Cheryl, following a car crash, but do away with the cult and paranormal activity to deliver a more intimate story. There would still be monsters, but they'd be confined exclusively to the now-frozen Otherworld – a place that, it would transpire, was a manifestation of Cheryl's psyche, not protagonist Harry's.
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But to omit combat completely, Climax had to use a bit of cunning. Producer William Oertel was insistent that Konami wanted motion‑control combat, letting players physically flick at monsters with their Wiimotes. However, when William was fired late in development, Climax pounced on the one-day transition between producers to enact their vision.
"In one afternoon we took the design docs, removed all the bits we didn't like – the temperature pills, the combat – and uploaded the document the next day," Sam recalls. "The new producer turned up the next day and told us what we were doing was very ambitious. We just said, 'Yep, that's what's been signed off!'"
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