It wasn’t easy for Team Silent in 1999 to come up with Silent Hill: a survival horror game that is now technically outdated, but still considered revolutionary.

Under the leadership of Keiichiro Toyama, Team Silent has left a lasting impression for a quarter of a century because of the Silent Hill games. But it’s also worth remembering Takayoshi Sato, who was given fairly simple tasks at Konami (such as designing the font), but eventually became one of Silent Hill’s most dedicated developers. But the road to that position was a hard one, and Sato had to seriously blackmail his employer to get a chance…

Of course, Sato didn’t start his career at Silent Hill. After studying art at Konami, he worked on Sexy Parodius, a PlayStation and SEGA Saturn port of a shoot’em up (originally an arcade title). In his spare time, he learned 3D modeling and eventually became an important member of the team, but Sato asked to be listed in the credits or he would no longer help the crew. Although he helped the others with 3D modeling, he officially had a negligible role in the game. Sato put together a demo video of his experience working in 3D. He presented it to Konami’s management and asked to work on Silent Hill or Metal Gear Solid, two of the Japanese company’s big projects at the time, but with due recognition and the same threat. Konami eventually agreed.

Sato initially worked on 3D models of the Silent Hill characters, but instead of working from the concepts and illustrations taken over from Team Silent, he reworked Harry Mason, Cheryl, Cybil Bennett, Lisa Garland, and others. But Konami wouldn’t let it go: they assigned a visual supervisor to the project to officially fill Sato’s role, which would have changed the roster again, which Sato didn’t want. Sato then took it upon himself to create the scenes for Silent Hill, which turned out to be a gigantic task. He lived in Konami’s offices for more than two years because that’s how long it took to render on the 150 computers the studio used. But colleagues needed the PCs to work, so Sato worked on them at night for the videos.

This made Sato one of the most important people on Silent Hill, and he managed to get his name properly listed in the credits and then went on to work on Silent Hill 2 as a CGI director and character designer. He bounced around from Konami to several companies, but eventually landed at Nintendo as a visual producer… and he did it all with a blackmail scheme. That’s not bad.

Source: 3djuegos