The Remastered Collection of the Classic Silent Hill Games Should’ve Been a Success
Back in 2012, the Silent Hill HD Collection was considered to be one of the most botched remasters of its console generation. At the time, it was inexplicable how poorly-made the remasters were since the collection was being published by Konami. Recently, an interview with a developer who worked on the remasters revealed what went wrong during the collection’s development.
According to the developer (who spoke anonymously), Konami decided to remaster the first three Silent Hill games in order to “join into the trend” of the HD remasters that were coming out at the time.
“From what I remember, Konami wanted to join into the trend of HD Remasters that were occurring on PS3 and Xbox 360 at the time,” the developer said. “It’s possible Sony or MS even approached them about it, as Silent Hill was a key franchise owned by Konami US, to go along with Metal Gear from Konami Japan, and so on.”
However, development ran into some problems because the source code and assets of the PS2 Silent Hill games were unfinished. Due to this, the developers basically had to rebuild the PS2 games with unfinished code.
When asked about whether or not the amount of time and budget the developers were given wasn’t ideal for the project they were undertaking, the developer said that this was “definitely” the case.
“I imagine Konami management saw this as a very quick and painless way to make some money while HD Remasters were popular,” the developer explained. “It was meant to be one of the first third party collections (Sony had done several early on) but ended up taking much longer. The intended schedule was a few months, but by the end we spent more than a year on the project.”
The developer also explained why the troubled project wasn’t simply cancelled: “Since the game had gone so long past its original schedule, it just had to come out or be canceled. Everyone knew how important an HD Silent Hill would be to fans, so we decided to clean it up as best as we could and release it, rather than canceling the project.”