Konami may have unwittingly revealed the upcoming games for the Silent Hill Transmission event later today.
This is because they put up the YouTube link for Silent Hill Transmission well in advance of its actual broadcast. They unwittingly put up what look like titles for Silent Hill games in the YouTube link metadata. That data has been removed but not before someone managed to catch it.
This is what came up in the metadata:
“SILENT HILL 2’,
“SILENT HILL’,
“PlayStation”,
“Steam”,
“SILENT HILL Transmission”,
“SILENT HILL f”,
“Ascension”,
“SILENT HILL: Ascension”,
“Return to SILENT HILL’,
Originating on the PlayStation in 1999, Silent Hill was a unique attempt by a team of Japanese developers to make a survival horror game with a Western narrative. The game innovated in pushing the survival horror game genre to unironic, effective psychological horror, enabled then by the power and features of the original PlayStation. Its immediate sequel, Silent Hill 2, pushed that vision forward to the PlayStation 2, and alongside other horror games like Fatal Frame, Clock Tower 3, The Suffering, and Siren, they pushed the envelope on what video games can accomplish, as well as the limits of what horror video games can do.
If Konami is re-exploring rereleases of the first two Silent Hill games, they may be seeking to undo the mistakes of the Silent Hill HD Collection. Originally released in March 2012 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the Silent Hill HD Collection were HD updates to Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 respectively. The collection was received very poorly, by fans and reviewers, and is commonly ascribed to by fans as the reason the franchise had been inactive for the past decade. Among other things, its supposed updated HD graphics undid some key elements of the game design, and there were issues with the voice acting, particularly for Silent Hill 3.
A key problem if Konami is planning a Silent Hill 2 rerelease is that the company had already lost the source code for the game as far back as when they were making Silent Hill HD Collection. At this point, their best option would seem to be to produce a complete remake, the same way Capcom made recent remakes for Resident Evil games starting with Resident Evil 2 in 2019. Technically, this remake series started with Resident Evil in 2002. However, the jump to today’s consoles enabled Capcom to create significantly different game designs, that attempt to recontextualize and fully realize the ambitions and ideas of the original games.
Most fans should also remember quite well that Hideo Kojima was supposed to make a new game in the franchise, called Silent Hills. To cut it short, Kojima had a falling out with his fellow management at Konami, and was unceremoniously ushered out of the company without finishing Silent Hills.
Today, Silent Hill is a very promising franchise to bring back. Even if Konami only made remakes of the first games, they’re in a good position to make more terrifying and playable experiences powered by this generation of gaming. It should be noted the metadata suggests they’ll have new projects as well. Stay tuned with us as we follow Silent Hill Transmission later today for the latest game announcements.
Source: Twitter
