R.I.P. Silent Hills: We Hardly Knew Thee

Published on by Josh Bray
Recent news and words from one of the directors indicates that Silent Hills is now dead.

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I have sad news to de­liv­er to­day folks. I won’t pon­tif­i­cate on it in a larg­er fash­ion now be­cause, frankly, it bums me out too much to think long on it over­long. Silent Hills is dead. Despite the fu­ture of the ti­tle be­ing in the grey af­ter the de­par­ture of Hideo Kojima, we now have in­for­ma­tion as well as a words from Guillermo del Toro him­self when he spoke at San Francisco International Film Festival last night.

We al­ready had seen Konami re­mov­ing the “A Hideo Kojima Game” from the mar­ket­ing for Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hills. Fans — in­clud­ing my­self — had hoped that Del Toro at least would be able to con­tin­ue on the Silent Hills project even if Kojima was gone. Now we are start­ing to see signs that Konami is start­ing to nix the project al­to­geth­er, in­clud­ing re­mov­ing P.T (the playable teas­er for Silent Hills) from the Playstation Store.

Del Toro re­port­ed­ly had this to say about the now ill-fated project last night:

This just breaks my heart. As a long time fan of the Silent Hill se­ries, I was re­al­ly look­ing for­ward to what the com­bi­na­tion of Kojima and Del Toro would bring to the ta­ble. Even though the qual­i­ty of the fran­chise had de­clined with re­cent re­leas­es, I was still cau­tious­ly op­ti­mistic about how Silent Hills turns out.

Now I just hope they kill it off en­tire­ly. Without the back­ing of pas­sion­ate and dri­ven di­rec­tors, I can’t see a new it­er­a­tion of Silent Hill (or Hills) be­ing any bet­ter than the lack­lus­ter line that has marked its re­cent lineage.

Given the re­cent dust-ups at Konami, and the si­lence on the is­sue, I feel that even if Silent Hills con­tin­ues it will not be the in the same ca­pac­i­ty that had my­self and oth­ers hope­ful for the fu­ture of this franchise.

Thanks Konami. Wonderful Birthday News.

NOTE (3:30pm EST 4/26/2015): It’s been clar­i­fied that the com­ment from Del Toro in ques­tion was in re­gards to him col­lab­o­rat­ing with Hideo Kojima on Silent Hills. Not 100% con­fir­ma­tion the project it­self is dead. Not that I was in­fer­ring Konami was nev­er go­ing to make a Silent Hill or Hills game in the fu­ture at this point. Only that that the project as we knew it is cur­rent­ly dead in the water.

Note 2 (11:00am EST 4/27/2015): It is of­fi­cial­ly of­fi­cial now. Gamespot spoke with Konami re­gard­ing Sillent Hills and a state­ment from the com­pa­ny had this to say:

“Konami is com­mit­ted to new Silent Hill ti­tles, how­ev­er the em­bry­on­ic ‘Silent Hills’ project de­vel­oped with Guillermo del Toro and fea­tur­ing the like­ness of Norman Reedus will not be continued.

In terms of Kojima and del Toro be­ing in­volved, dis­cus­sions on fu­ture Silent Hill projects are cur­rent­ly un­der­way, and please stay tuned for fur­ther announcements.”

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Josh Bray

Josh has worked in IT for over 15 years. Graduated Broadcasting school in 2012 with a fo­cus on A/V pro­duc­tion. Amateur pho­tog­ra­ph­er with a pas­sion to make things work… by any means nec­es­sary. Editor-in-Chief and do-er of tech things at SuperNerdLand
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