Bloober Teamismaking another Silent Hill game. This isn’t surprising, given thatSilent Hill 2was a majorcriticalandcommercial win for both Konami and Bloober Team. It’s especially unsurprising because, when I talked to Wojciech Piejko and Jacek Zięba, game directors of Bloober’s upcoming Cronos: The New Dawn, at the Game Developers Conference earlier this year,they said the studio wouldn’t be going back to its earlier first-person, combat-free horror. Remaking the first Silent Hill is a continuation of this trajectory, making bigger, better, and more triple-A-ish games.
As a new fan of the series, whose introduction was Silent Hill 2 —
Well, actually, it wasSilent Hill: The Short Message, but the less said about that game, the better.
— I’m excited to finally experience the first game in the series. But I am frustrated that, while Konami is putting in the significant time, money, and effort to revive one of its marquee series, it seemingly isn’t putting in the same work to make the original games playable on modern hardware.
The Older Silent Hill Games Are Hard To Find
The first Silent Hill isn’t available digitally anywhere. If you have aPS3orPSPwith it downloaded from PSN, you can play it there. And if you own an originalPlayStationand a physical copy, you can play it there. Otherwise, you’re out of luck. Hell, my colleague James Lucas wascomplaining about this four years ago, and nothing has changed.
The sequels,Silent Hill 2and3, are available on modernXboxconsoles, but only through the Silent Hill HD Collection — widely considered to be inferior. I’ve always held off on buying and playing the games that way because the HD Collection received some horrible reviews at launch and was never fixed. The onlyPS2-era Silent Hill game that’s currently available on PC isSilent Hill 4: The Room.
And that’s thanks toCD Projekt Red’s preservation efforts which, unfortunately for the Steam faithful, means it’s only available onGOG.com.
Make It Happen!
There’s no good reason for this. Yes, it takes some time, money, and effort, but far less of all three than it takes to develop a triple-A remake from the ground up. I don’t know how much Silent Hill 2 cost to make, but Bloober’s previous third-person horror game,The Medium, cost around $7 million, and its remaster, Observer: System Redux, cost about $2.5 million.
While Capcom is similarly remaking classic Resident Evil games, it has also been porting the originals to GOG and PlayStation.
As the big, triple-A reboot to an established brand, Silent Hill 2 undoubtedly cost more than either. Let’s say $10 million for the sake of argument (though it could be much more). Depending on how exactly Konami brought the old games forward, the price would vary. If they were full graphical overhauls like the Spyro and Crash Bandicoot remaster trilogies, it could be in the neighborhood of System Redux. But if they were simple ports, it would cost far less. Given the amount of increased interest the big Bloober remakes bring in, the ports would pay for themselves.
Silent Hill 2 remake is a great game. Silent Hill probably will be, too. These remakes would be fantastic advertising for the rest of the series… if only it were possible to play them.
