Western-made Silent Hill games are often recalled with blanket derision, but Climax's efforts deserve to be remembered, as the British developer took the esteemed franchise in interesting new directions

WORDS BY ROBERT ZAK

SAM BARLOW

Sam went on to find success as an indie developer with Her Story and Telling Lies. He’s currently working on the mysterious Project  Ambrosio, and also revealed that he can’t talk too much about hypothetical Silent Hill projects because he’s currently pitching an idea along those lines. Intriguing!

How do you pick up the reins to one of the most unique and auteurial horror franchises of all time?  In 2007, British work-for-hire studio Climax found out the hard way, picking up the pieces of a misdirected Silent Hill prequel for the PSP before creating a memorable reimagining of the original game.

The Silent Hill series was in a strange place in 2005. The sales of each successive entry were worse than the last, and the esoteric vision of Team Silent, the internal Konami team behind the first four games, was at odds with the trend towards more guns-out horror. By the time Silent Hill 4: The Room came out, Konami Japan had all but given up on the series, and Team Silent was disbanded.

But over at Konami’s US base, buzz around the upcoming Silent Hill movie and the reasonable success of a mishmash of videos, music and digital comics called The Silent Hill Experience on Sony’s shiny new PSP suggested there may be some life yet in the moribund Maine town.

Around this time, long-running British studio Climax set up a Los Angeles office to tap into the lucrative West Coast games business. This move paid off, because by the end of 2005 it had penned a deal to make the next Silent Hill game – a prequel to the original Silent Hill designed for Sony’s portable powerhouse.

This was great news for Climax, putting in its hands an original game in one of the great horror series. However, members of the studio’s UK team, which was working on a Ghost Rider PSP game at the time, saw fundamental problems with the idea. Sam Barlow, writer and lead designer at the studio, spotted the red flags. “The very idea of making a prequel to Silent Hill wasn’t good,” he tells us. “That game told its story brilliantly through flashbacks, and there weren’t really any unanswered questions.”

For several months, the UK team remained uninvolved as Silent Hill: Origins began forming into an action-oriented Resident Evil 4-style game, with an over-the-shoulder perspective that was never a comfortable fit for the PSP’s stubby single analog stick, nor for the claustrophobic corridors so synonymous with Silent Hill.