Silent Hills’ cancellation remains a tragedy- so much so that, one year on, fans, fanboys, and gaming enthusiast websites such as this one still have not been able to get over it. But for the people who were involved in the actual making of the game, it has to have hurt more. We have often discussed Kojima’s side of the story a lot, but amazingly, people often forget that a name as big as Guillermo del Toro, the famed movie director, was also attached to the project.
In an interview with Bloody Disgusting, he opened up about how he felt when Silent Hills was cancelled.
“It was curious,” he said. “We had a great experience and had great story sessions with hundreds upon hundreds of designs. Some of the stuff that we were designing for Silent Hills I’ve seen in games that came after, like The Last of Us, which makes me think we were not wrong, we were going in the right direction.
“The thing with Kojima and Silent Hills is that I thought we would do a really remarkable game and really go for the jugular. We were hoping to actually create some sort of panic with some of the devices we were talking about and it is really a shame that it’s not happening. When you ask about how things operate, that makes no sense at all that that game is not happening.”
“Makes no sense at all. That’s the randomness that I was talking about,” he concluded.
It’s clear that it still rankles with him- and the tragedy is, after the double whammy of the canceled Halo game that he was working on, and now Silent Hills, there is a very real possibility that Toro will never attempt an entry into the gaming industry again. We may have lost an excellent outsider’s perspective because of the volatility of the industry.