We delve into the history of what could have been the great horror game from the creator of Metal Gear Solid
It was already the summer of 2012 when Kojima published a tweet in which the creative was about to see the Silent Hill movie. This feature film included monsters designed by Masahiro Ito himself, something that fascinated Kojima himself.
In fact, in his tweets he remembers that he played Silent Hill at the time and was unable to pass it on. Kojima had so many memories that he couldn’t help but think of a game developed with the Fox Engine, the engine that gave life to Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain. Everything remained a mere anecdote until the Eurogamer expo in 2012. Barely. a month later, they interviewed Kojima and one of the questions was that allusion to Silent Hill in his tweets: “I have been mentioning Silent Hill in other interviews and therefore the president of Konami contacted me to say that he would like me to take care of the next Silent Hill. (…) That said, I think it has a special atmosphere. This saga must continue and I would love to help make it happen. And if I can also lend a hand with the Fox Engine technology, I would love to be able to participate in it. ”From this moment on, the machinery started up and nobody knew it. Konami had expressed his desire to continue the saga and Kojima had the last word. Well, him and his desire to capture the movement of actors like Norman Reedus and Ryan Gosling.
Not even Masahiro Ito, designer of the Silent Hill monsters, denied his illusion to make a new game. However, tweets and interviews did not generate too much controversy and always remained as one more anecdote. No one fueled the rumors of a new Silent Hill and it wasn’t even theorized too much with it more than four madmen obsessed with Kojima-san. Unthinkable nowadays, right? Time passed and it wasn’t until Gamescom 2014 that a short PT teaser was released. Kojima revealed that this acronym stood for Playable Teaser, and it was nothing more than an interactive teaser in which we had to find out what he was hiding and also revealed Kojima’s luxury partners: Guillermo del Toro and Normal Reedus. Films like Pan’s Labyrinth or The Shape of Water joined the project came very early, even before the teaser was released: “I met Kojima many years ago when he visited me at Bleak House, my horror museum. We ate and had a very interesting conversation about how to tell stories in the genre. Collaborating with a teacher like Kojima was irresistible. We talked about concepts, ideas and tools in his Tokyo offices and he sent me a demo of the game, a totally different one than the one you have played. ”They both wanted to get an invasive horror game that would transcend the screen, something similar to what he achieved Psyco Mantis in Metal Gear Solid.
In addition, the idea of playing it in the third person was also thought about, so it was going to be very different from what we saw in PT. In fact, designs were already prepared for the enemies and characters that we were going to meet. Many of them were to be designed by Junji Ito, a Japanese horror manga creator whom Del Toro had long admired and who joined shortly after he was there. Norman Reedus came later, but relations between Kojima’s team and he were easy. The actor known for being on shows like The Walking Dead knew Del Toro from Mimic, and the idea of developing a game with Kojima fascinated him. As a curiosity, PT has always been accompanied by an image of a forest along with 7780s, the name of the developer. The image of the forest is the backyard of one of the developers, while the developer has never existed. Kojima’s idea was to come up with a name so as not to put Konami and let people know that Silent Hills was coming back without first passing the teaser.
