In a recent Q&A session with investors, horror game developer Bloober Team has announced that it has started working on remake of the original Silent Hill. This confirmation comes when the studio was asked by an investor what its future projects are in light of the recent release of Cronos: The New Dawn.
Along with starting work on the Silent Hill remake, Bloober Team has also revealed that one of its teams is working on five different projects, with all of them likely being in their early stages of development.
“We have two first party production teams, one of which is working on the Silent Hill 1 project and the other has started work on the next project,” said the studio in response (via machine translation). “As part of the second party, there are currently 5 projects.”
The studio also revealed other details about its recent releases, noting that PC (via Steam) accounted for approximately 25 percent of sales for Cronos: The New Dawn. The same team is also now being noted as working on multiple projects at the same time, while focusing one main project and four smaller ones.
As for the Silent Hill 2 remake from 2024, Bloober Team has also noted that issues that the title might be facing in terms of performance or optimisation problems are largely up to Konami to fix. It also didn’t make any note of potential updates or DLC releases for the title.
Konami had confirmed that Bloober Team would be working on the remake of Silent Hill back in June. While the publisher didn’t reveal too many details about the remake, it did release a short video featuring the announcement, which also had musical nods to the PlayStation original which first came out back in 1999.
The decision to remake the original Silent Hill was likely made by Konami since a jump to remaking Silent Hill 3 wouldn’t be an enticing prospect for players, since much of the latter game’s plot revolves around the consequences of the events in the original.
Back in February, Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto wrote about Konami’s decision to work with Bloober Team for the remake of Silent Hill 2. In a post, Okamoto wrote about how game design expertise isn’t as important when it comes to creating horror experiences as genre expertise and experience tends to be. This, he noted, was what made Bloober Team the right choice for the remake.
“No matter how broad a game design expert’s knowledge is, they won’t be hired to work on a fighting game if they have no experience developing fighting games,” wrote Okamoto. “The same goes for horror. But then, with companies requiring such genre-specific experience, you realize that everyone has to start out as a novice for the given genre at some point. Nowadays, indie development has become the way to overcome that.”
“In modern times, regardless of the genre, if there’s passion, one should be creating something, and by properly evaluating that, it should be possible to discern whether someone can take on genre fiction,” he continued.
The Silent Hill franchise has been going quite strong recently, especially thanks to the release of Silent Hill f just last week. For more details, check out our review.