Konami deliberately kept its multiple Silent Hill games secret from each studio, to avoid ideas crossing over

Konami deliberately kept the developers working on its Silent Hill projects apart, and didn’t show them what the other studios were working on.

That’s according to Screen Burn founder and Silent Hill Townfall director Jon McKellan, who stated during a panel at the MCM London Comic Con that his team wasn’t made aware of what was going on with the other Silent Hill games in development.

“We found out about a lot of those projects when everyone else did, when they announced them,” McKellan claimed.

He added that even once the games had been announced Konami made an effort not to show each Silent Hill team how the others were doing.

“Okamoto-san, who’s the series producer, was very keen to not let projects influence each other, and not compromise too much,” he explained.

“And the understanding, I think, was that he and his team would be reviewing everything from all the games, and if they saw something where, you know, something we were doing was maybe a little bit too close to something else then they would step in and say ‘you might want to course-correct here’.

“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’.”

“We got to be very creatively free,” McKellan says

McKellan stressed that this wasn’t problematic for the team, and was a good idea because it allowed each game to remain entirely separate, while also allowing the Townfall team – many of whom were already Silent Hill fans – to still be excited when they eventually saw the other games in development.

“So we were kind of kept in the dark, which was kind of exciting as a fan to not see behind the curtain too much,” he explained. “We got to see Silent Hill F a couple of months before it came out, and there’s such a massive difference between F and Townfall in terms of their experience and their setting, that there was no real risk of overlap.

“But we were kind of kept in the dark, but in a good way, in a way that didn’t feel like we had to play to some bigger plan. 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.”

“We got to be very creatively free, just with the knowledge that Konami and the team there would step in if they felt they had to.

“I think only once did we have a thing, just on a visual design or something, where they felt ‘this is maybe a little too close, you may want to pivot and just go in a different option’ for one of the enemy designs. And it wasn’t massively similar, it was just enough to be like ‘it’s maybe touching on the same design too much, so let’s just veer off’.

“But knowing that there was a team just quietly monitoring and checking in on the projects was reassuring while you were working, that they’d let you know if you’re not on the right path.”