Konami deliberately kept the studios making its new Silent Hill games apart, according to Silent Hill Townfall director Jon McKellan. Speaking on a panel at MCM London Comic Con, the Screen Burn founder said his team was not told what the other Silent Hill projects were, as reported by VGC.
“We found out about a lot of those projects when everyone else did, when they announced them,” McKellan said. Even after the games were public, he said Konami avoided showing each team how the others were progressing.
The reason was creative independence. “Okamoto-san, who’s the series producer, was very keen to not let projects influence each other, and not compromise too much,” McKellan explained. Motoi Okamoto’s team reviewed work from every game, and if two projects started drifting toward the same idea, they would step in without revealing the details. “They’d not necessarily tell us what it was, but just be like ‘there’s another thing that’s doing something similar, so maybe veer off from that direction,’” he said.
McKellan said that only happened once for Townfall, over an enemy design that was “maybe touching on the same design too much.” Otherwise, he described the arrangement as freeing. “It wasn’t like a Marvel phase where it would be like ‘know your slot and stay within that,’ we got to be free while we worked,” he said. His team did get to see Silent Hill f a couple of months before it launched, and he said the two games were so different in setting and experience that there was no real risk of overlap.
Konami’s Silent Hill revival has spread across several outside studios, with Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake and NeoBards’ Silent Hill f already out, and Screen Burn, the Glasgow studio behind Townfall, is one of the newest teams in the mix. Many of its developers were longtime fans of the series, McKellan said, which made the secrecy feel exciting rather than frustrating.
It has been a busy month for horror fans, from new releases to Dead by Daylight preparing to lose Chucky on Nov. 24.
