Ex-Silent Hill Producer Tom Hulett Comes Clean
After Silent Hill 4: The Room, which was the last game created by Team Silent, the series’ reputation started to spiral. Now, former Konami employee Tomm Hulett—who is listed as an associate producer of Origins and Homecoming, producer of Shattered Memories and Book of Memories, and senior associate producer of Downpour—is opening up about his experiences being the scapegoated for the series’ decline.
“What bothers me about it most is that when people attribute the ‘F#ck Konami’ hashtag, they’re thinking of me,” he said. “I know that some people are typing it like, yeah, Tomm Hulett sucks!”
“[Producer] Devin [Shatsky] was running Downpour while I finished Shattered Memories,” Hulett said when talking about the first time he realized he was seen as the one carrying the weight and blame of the series. “There’d be interviews [on forums] and you’d see in the question threads, people would be like: ‘ask him why he sucks’,’ask him why he hates Silent Hill’.”
Although Konami never blamed Hulett, his reputation as the destroyer of Silent Hill spread through the industry.
“Since then, at other companies, I think it has affected people’s view of me, because I’ll hear comments from time to time of: Oh, my friend works at that company, and he hates you,'” he said. “Or I’ve talked to various companies, and then had contact shut off. And then I always suspect like… Oh, someone there’s a Silent Hill fan.”
“Knowing that people in the industry are taking that at face value and are letting that reflect on what they see of me and my abilities is like, really? Do you understand this could be you? [Players] could just see your name on a thing that you worked on and turn on you,” he added. “It’s not factual. It’s not based in things you actually did and things you actually impacted, because they don’t know.”
Hulett was pretty vocal during his time at Konami working on Silent Hill and definitely said some things that pissed off fans (talking smack about the series’ beloved Silent Hill 2 didn’t help at all). But as he says, it’s a bit too simple to put all the blame on him.
“There’s not one guy making all the decisions on a video game,” he said. “That’s just not how they work. I get that there’s a lot of factors that really put a target on me but internally, I was only the Silent Hill guy in the fact that I had played all the games, I already knew them as a fan, and I knew all the details and all the characters so no-one else had to research it because they could just ask me. In that way, I was the Silent Hill guy. Or the Silent Hill bible or whatever. Whichever quote people want to say that I said and use that against me.”