Without Keiichiro Toyama, the first Silent Hill in 1999 wouldn’t have been on the PS1 (he was the director), which means Konami wouldn’t have had a competitor in the survival horror genre against Capcom’s Resident Evil series.

Silent Hill has had many rumours in the past few years, and we have kept track of most of them. However, Konami (and Sony?) is silent about the nowadays ignored franchise, while Capcom still keeps going strong with Resident Evil that recently got its 8th main instalment. However, there is no better person than Toyama to talk about how Silent Hill should be handled.

VGC interviewed him, but not just because of Silent Hill. Don’t forget, Toyama was one of many people who left Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan Studio before its closure. He formed an independent studio called Bokeh Game Studio. Its first game was shown at The Game Awards; Slitterhead was the main subject of the interview, but Silent Hill was also mentioned.

“I think [Silent Hill] would be harder to remake than [Resident Evil] because the gameplay as a concept is a little older. It’s not an action game where you can just refine the action as in Biohazard. The fans wouldn’t be satisfied to bring Silent Hill up to current standards or polish up the graphics. That’s not what it was about — how beautiful it was. I think you’d have to rethink the concept to make it interesting to fans. If there were to be a new entry in the future, I would be very interested in it as one user. I know many games followed in the footsteps of Silent Hill today, so I would particularly like to know what a new entry would leave and change from the original,” Toyama said.

And about Slitterhead, he said, “As for [Slitterhead], we have completed our prototyping phase. We will be using our knowledge gained from the feedback to enter full production. Though it’s too early to reveal any details about the game, and it will take some time before release, we hope you look forward to it!” Which would explain why they mentioned no target platforms (he previously said that the PC is their primary…) and release window. We can wait.

Source: WCCFTech