The Silent Hill series has been dormant, with fans still disappointed by Hideo Kojima’s cancelled Silent Hills project, and no main game has been released for nearly a decade. Rumors of a remake, reboot, and even a new film continue to circulate like a fog hanging over the infamous city.

Any long-running series with as many titles and instalments as Silent Hill is bound to have some retorts, contradictions, and common misconceptions. The history of the Silent Hill games should help set the record straight about the eerie lakeside resort.

Team Silent: Silent Hill’s Golden Age

The first Silent Hill was released for the Sony PlayStation in 1999, with developer Konami looking to build on the success of rival Capcom’s new Resident Evil series. The game established some of the series’ enduring clichés by depicting a “regular guy” protagonist who is drawn to the quiet resort town of Silent Hill after surviving, in this case as opposed to an elite cop like Resident Evil’s Chris Redfield. A car accident on the outskirts of town. When Harry Mason wakes up in his wrecked car, his seven-year-old daughter is nowhere to be found. So he wanders into a nearby town to look for her.

Silent Hill was developed by a group of artists and programmers who came together from other projects and called themselves “Team Silent”, a group that was notoriously considered a “failed” group at the time due to the poor results of other Konami projects. Low expectations for the game allowed the team a lot of creative freedom to create a gaming experience that avoided B-movie trash like Resident Evil. Instead, Silent Hill gave players a disturbing Lynchian horror game that became one of the most influential titles of all time.

Akira Yamaoka was appointed as the game’s director, along with other notable members of Team Silent, such as director Keiichiro Toyama, who would later helm the Siren games, and art designer Masahiro Ito, who created the iconic Pyramid Head (more on him later…). Sound designers were committed. His combination of strange audio effects, melancholic music, and brutal industrial noises became synonymous with the series, and he even toured the world as part of the band that played the game’s famous soundtrack.

One of the game’s sound design masterpieces was the use of a broken radio that emitted static whenever an enemy approached the protagonist. This was considered a sophisticated scare strategy and is one of the reasons the game is considered one of the scariest games of all time. Players fear an attack from Silent Hill’s terrifying monsters long before they appear on screen.

This mechanic worked perfectly with another of the game’s innovations: the use of fog to limit the player’s field of vision. Although this approach was originally intended to address the technical limitations of the original PlayStation, it was also praised for helping to create the game’s unique, oppressive atmosphere; this feature has also become an integral part of the series.

The success of Silent Hill led to a sequel, Silent Hill 2, released in 2001. The game tells the story of down-on-his-luck James Sunderland, who attempts to find his wife in the titular town after writing her a letter calling her to a “special place” years before the designated location, where she died of an illness. Reviews at the time were fairly positive, but not overwhelming, but the game was later considered a horror masterpiece and consistently ranked high on lists of “greatest horror games of all time”.

Silent Hill 2 has been met with a flurry of praise for its surreal dialogue, disturbing, dreamlike imagery, and unsettling plot twists. Its story was also praised for dealing with adult themes such as domestic violence and grief that were not commonly featured in games at the time. Its antagonist, Pyramid Head, has proven to be one of the most enduring villains in video game history. The game also showed that Silent Hill could be an effective setting for a number of terrifying tales, with the city’s ability to reveal fears and dark secrets to its visitors providing ample room for storytelling.

A common misconception about the original Silent Hill is that the town was inspired by Centralia in Columbia County, Pennsylvania. This was not the case. The idea was introduced as part of the town’s backstory in the first Silent Hill film, which portrayed the falling snow in the first game as flakes of ash from an underground coal fire that still burned beneath the roads.

While this cleverly wove into the existing mythology of the first game, with the ghost city being a physical manifestation of the nightmarish delusions of a tormented child, it caused some confusion among fans of the game. This controversy was exacerbated by later titles adopting elements of the film’s plot in place of the lore of the original Team Silent games, as well as a number of other perceived shortcomings with later releases.

Silent Hill Sequels, Movies… and Pachinko Machines

Two further sequels, namely Silent Hill 3 (2003) and Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004), were developed by Team Silent. Silent Hill 3 picks up the story of Harry Mason, making his rescued daughter the hero. It is the only game in the series with a female protagonist, while Silent Hill 4 was a more experimental title, in which the player took on the role of a man trapped in his apartment.
The
team received generally positive reviews, but was later disbanded after Konami decided to outsource development of future titles to Western studios. This led to many games that fans of the series consider to be inferior to the first four titles, while some consider some of the later Silent Hill games to be underrated.

The first of these Western-developed titles was Silent Hill: Origins, originally a PSP exclusive when it launched in 2007. The game was criticized for adding nothing new to the aging Silent Hill formula and for having a boring protagonist, but it still received positive reviews. The game was released shortly after the 2006 film Silent Hill, starring Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean. The film is considered one of the best film adaptations of a video game, despite some criticism. At this point, with several new projects in the works, the Silent Hill series still seemed to be on an upward trajectory.

However, in the following years, the series quickly fell into a state of rustiness more pronounced than its famous “Another World”. Silent Hill: Homecoming, released in 2008, brought the corrupted city to the PS3 and Xbox, but was widely considered to be one of the weakest installments in the series. The plot was heavily criticized for being influenced by splatter films such as Hostel and for featuring a competent war veteran as the protagonist, rather than the weak and tragic protagonists of other titles.

The Nintendo Wii, released in 2009, was more favorably received. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was praised for its story (a rethinking of the first game) and its innovative use of the Wii Remote as a cell phone, flashlight, and even a scalpel. The game’s voice acting and graphics were also praised, although the game’s brevity and simple puzzles received some criticism.

However, 2012 saw four disappointing failures for Silent Hill. The sequel film, Silent Hill: Revelations, was a critical and commercial flop, and the Silent Hill HD Collection was heavily criticized for being full of bugs and glitches, due to Konami losing the source code for the original game.

Two further sequels, namely Silent Hill 3 (2003) and Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004), were developed by Team Silent. Silent Hill 3 picks up the story of Harry Mason, making his rescued daughter the hero. It is the only game in the series with a female protagonist, while Silent Hill 4 was a more experimental title, in which the player took on the role of a man trapped in his apartment.
The
team received generally positive reviews, but was later disbanded after Konami decided to outsource development of future titles to Western studios. This led to many games that fans of the series consider to be inferior to the first four titles, while some consider some of the later Silent Hill games to be underrated.

The first of these Western-developed titles was Silent Hill: Origins, originally a PSP exclusive when it launched in 2007. The game was criticized for adding nothing new to the aging Silent Hill formula and for having a boring protagonist, but it still received positive reviews. The game was released shortly after the 2006 film Silent Hill, starring Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean. The film is considered one of the best film adaptations of a video game, despite some criticism. At this point, with several new projects in the works, the Silent Hill series still seemed to be on an upward trajectory.

However, in the following years, the series quickly fell into a state of rustiness more pronounced than its famous “Another World”. Silent Hill: Homecoming, released in 2008, brought the corrupted city to the PS3 and Xbox, but was widely considered to be one of the weakest installments in the series. The plot was heavily criticized for being influenced by splatter films such as Hostel and for featuring a competent war veteran as the protagonist, rather than the weak and tragic protagonists of other titles.

The Nintendo Wii, released in 2009, was more favorably received. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was praised for its story (a rethinking of the first game) and its innovative use of the Wii Remote as a cell phone, flashlight, and even a scalpel. The game’s voice acting and graphics were also praised, although the game’s brevity and simple puzzles received some criticism.

However, 2012 saw four disappointing failures for Silent Hill. The sequel film, Silent Hill: Revelations, was a critical and commercial flop, and the Silent Hill HD Collection was heavily criticized for being full of bugs and glitches, due to Konami losing the source code for the original game.