Konami might consider bringing back Silent Hill (the original series) on next generation consoles like PS5 and Xbox Series A move completely identical to the one already accomplished a few months ago with Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection VOL. 1. To report the indiscretion, exactly these days, it’s the international Eurogamer portal. The confirmation is missing, but the suggestion remains.
Silent Hill: not just the remake and the ‘new’ ones, also the classics on console and PC?
These are major ‘absents’ in the panorama of games that can be used on modern consoles thanks to backward compatibility. Unless you own one original copy of the first Silent Hill – or a digital copy on PS3 – the 1999 game is essentially unavailable. Things are little better for SH2 and SH3. The games starring James Sunderland and Heather Manson respectively are purchasable as a single package with the HD Collection. The box set was available for PS3 and Xbox 360 and, at the time, continues to be sold digitally only on the Microsoft store. The box set, it must be said, appears to be well below acceptable quality standards.
But what happened? With the publication of The Short Message a few days ago, Konami also published a short series of documentaries starring the developers of Hexadrive and Konami who together have worked on the first playable SH for 10 years now. In the fourth (available below), Rika Miyatani – level design director of The Short Message – recounted the path taken until the release.
Hexadrive was in the running among the possible lead developers for Silent Hill 2 Remake. The pitch, however, did not go as expected and the task was then entrusted to Bloober Team. Hexadrive, however, was offered 6 months after the aforementioned TSM. Miyatani says that from that moment, the idea of a porting of the originals began to spread in discussions between studios.
Miyatani’s words Unfortunately they do not confirm that there is work in progress to really bring the original games to PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch as happened with the Master Collection. The idea, however, remains suggestive the fact that Konami seems really intent on bringing back its old and glorious IPs gives us hope.
At the moment, after the surprise release of The Short Message and after the Ascension experiment (essentially a failure, at least for the mainstream public), several other projects remain in the pipeline. The most important remains the remake of Silent Hill 2. They follow ‘Townfall’, by Annapurna Interactive e Silent Hill ‘f’, created by NeoBard based on a story by Ryūkishi07.