When Bloober Team was revealed to be the studio that Konami had selected to work with for a remake of one of the most iconic horror games ever, Silent Hill 2, the reaction from players wasn’t overwhelmingly positive.
By the time it was made official in October 2022, the last two games we’d gotten from the studio failed to impress overall. The 2019 Blair Witch game stands at a 69 on Metacritic, while The Medium sits only a few points higher at 71. Neither game instilled confidence that Bloober Team was the studio to remake Silent Hill 2.
Now that we’re actually nearing the release of the remake, we’re seeing that perhaps that pessimism was misplaced, and Bloober Team could very well have been the studio with the right amount of talent and reverence to do it right. Perhaps the biggest sign of that, even more than the recent gameplay showcase is producer Motoi Okamoto words, that Bloober Team were the ones fighting to keep things closer to the original.
In a recent interview with Famitsu, Okamoto paints a picture of Bloober Team as the ones who were consistently fighting back with Konami on making changes. Meanwhile many of the developers on Konami’s side, including members of the original Silent Hill 2 team, wanted to really shake things up.
Translated by VGC from the interview, Okamoto said,
“The Japanese staff, including Masahiro Ito, the designer who worked on the original version, and Akira Yamaoka, the sound designer, said ‘we want to change this part’, while on the other hand Bloober Team often replied saying ‘no, we don’t want to change this’!
Sometimes the opinions clashed, but in the end I think we managed to get it right. I think you’ll see in the latest trailer that while it’s been reborn in a modern style, we’ve retained the good qualities of the original version.”
Okamoto also added that the clash in opinion came from the original team not wanting to just go over work they’d already done, and instead wanting to make changes.
Bloober on the other hand loved the original, and felt it was better to not break what isn’t broken.
“But in the end, thanks to the opinions of Bloober Team, who are big fans of the original, the remake ended up being highly respectful of the original game. If we had formed a development team entirely in Japan, it might have turned out to be a completely different remake.”
Of course we’ve not played the remake yet, we don’t know how it’s truly ended up. But for a certain kind of fan, this admittance brings hope it’ll be the remake they’re hoping for.