Why Silent Hill 2 Remake studio Bloober didn't start by remaking Silent Hill 1? Developers explain

When Bloober and Konami announced that they were remaking Silent Hill 2 as part of an overarching series reboot, it made immediate sense to me, but it was also a bit of a downer. Silent Hill 2 is the most celebrated of the Hills – if I were a calculating franchise guardian tasked with ‘bringing back’ one of the acclaimed original trilogy, that’s probably the part my spreadsheets and I would focus on. Namely, the game with Pyramid Head in it – it’s the closest thing Silent Hill has to a mascot, and it has no problem cutting plots: every game in the Silent Hill series is, on some level, a distinct story with a distinct protagonist.

Still, the decision to 'skip' the first game in the series, whose world, narrative themes, music and art direction set the parameters for the others, left a bit of an itch in my brain, and when I ran into Bloober's creative director Mateusz Lenart and executive producer Maciej Głomb at a Konami event, I had to ask about it.


“I think Silent Hill 2 fits our DNA much better,” Lenart began. “It's a much more emotional, much more personal story than, say, the first game or the third game. And we at Bloober have always been fans of telling personal stories about people's experiences and people's feelings and how they live them. You know, not about occultism and otherworldly things, right? So I think that was the main reason.”

A bit of context: Without giving too much away, the original Silent Hill is very much a supernatural affair, with your character Harry getting dragged into various evil dealings, but it's also a psychological reflection piece. The sequel changes priorities, putting a very unsettled mastermind at the center, but keeping one foot in that occult lineage.

Lenart added that Bloober similarly prefers to tell “embedded” and focused stories. “Obviously [our games] “It has some supernatural elements, but in the end it's all about a particular person, a particular journey he has to take to find the truth about himself.”

Of course, the choice of which Silent Hill game to tackle was largely out of Bloober's hands. “Yeah, Silent Hill 2 is the best match for Bloober Team in terms of our DNA and the games we've made before and the ones we've made before,” Glomb admitted. “But then again, it wasn't really our decision to make, was it? The series is tied to Konami's plans.

“So we probably made that suggestion because of our DNA, because of our history with Silent Hill 2. And we were very happy to make that version of the game, because it just fit our feelings. Even with our previous games, we were very inspired by Silent Hill 2 in more specific ways – in Layers Of Fear, even though it was a completely different game, it was inspired by Silent Hill 2 in that it had different endings. There were those little things that we didn't tell you during the game that would lead to a different ending.”

As I said, if I were a shrewd Konami executive, I'd probably greenlight Silent Hill 2 for a remake before anyone else. But as a gamer, I'm curious to see how Bloober's remake will be received by those who haven't played the horror game that started the ball rolling. It's still my favorite of Hills, and Silent Hill 2 is a richer game for how it responds to the original – what it preserves, what it rejects.

While there has been a “remake” of sorts in the form of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, the original Silent Hill lives on today mostly as a retro horror staple: the PS1 graphics and visual direction have evolved into a distinct aesthetic, along with the hi-fi photorealism of the later Silent Hill sequels. I suppose Itch.io will always be there.

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