Jon McKellan, founder of Silent Hill Townfall developer Screen Burn Interactive, has revealed that publisher Konami kept the teams behind its latest Silent Hill projects apart so ideas wouldn’t crossover.
The psychological horror franchise was revived in 2022 with the announcement of a new series of titles after a long hiatus. Since then, we’ve seen Silent Hill: The Short Message, Silent Hill 2 Remake, Silent Hill f, and the aforementioned Silent Hill Townfall all released, with more projects – including a remake of Silent Hill (1999) – in the pipeline. However, McKellan revealed during MCM London Comic Con that the developers behind these game were not clued in on each others’ work.
We found out about a lot of those projects when everyone else did, when they announced them. Okamoto-san, who’s the series producer, was very keen to not let projects influence each other, and not compromise too much. And the understanding, I think, was that he and his team would be reviewing everything from all the games, and if they saw something where, you know, something we were doing was maybe a little bit too close to something else then they would step in and say ‘you might want to course-correct here. ‘
They’d not necessarily tell us what it was, but just be like ‘there’s another thing that’s doing something similar, so maybe veer off from that direction.’
While McKellen admitted the team were kept in the dark, he said it was actually exciting as a fan not to see what else was going on around them for the series. Nonetheless, McKellan said the team saw Silent Hill f a few months before its release, and noted how vastly different it was to their own project, thus eliminating any concerns of overlap.
So we were kind of kept in the dark, which was kind of exciting as a fan to not see behind the curtain too much. We got to see Silent Hill F a couple of months before it came out, and there’s such a massive difference between F and Townfall in terms of their experience and their setting, that there was no real risk of overlap. But we were kind of kept in the dark, but in a good way, in a way that didn’t feel like we had to play to some bigger plan. It wasn’t like a Marvel phase where it would be like ‘know your slot and stay within that’, we got to be free while we worked.
Earlier this month, Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto revealed that Konami is “looking at a number of projects” to continue the franchise with, noting he was pleased with the reception to the latest titles that have acted as the series’ modern revivla. Presumably Silent Hill Remake will be the first of the next wave of titles, although a release date hasn’t been confirmed yet.
[Source – VGC]