Silent Hill games haven’t had the best history with ports. The HD Collection has gone down in video game history as one of the worst ports ever and the franchise hasn’t appeared on PC without being seriously broken in some way. As it stands, you can’t play any of the classic SH titles on PS4 or PS5, which is crazy!
Preservation is a huge problem for the series and it seems like we almost had a solution.
This info comes from an interview about Silent Hill: The Short Message with Rika Miyatani, Level Design Director at HexaDrive. When discussing HexaDrive’s work on The Short Message, Miyatani described how the studio originally became involved with Silent Hill.
Per Miyatani:
A few years ago, Konami had actually reached out to us about potentially porting the Silent Hill series. Eventually, however, the team decided to prioritise a remake of Silent Hill 2 over ports of the games.
The team went on to make a prototype of a Silent Hill 2 remake, though as we now know Konami decided not to move forward with HexaDrive’s vision for such a project.
Miyatani explains:
Unfortunately, things didn’t work out at the time, but about half a year later, we heard from Konami again and this time it was to discuss (The Short Message).
The rest, as they say, is history. However, even though it seems modern Silent Hill ports aren’t currently in the works, it’s interesting that Konami were pursuing such an option.
Hopefully, Konami will release something like the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection (only with tigher ports) and finally give longtime fans a way to play their favorite SH titles on something other than emulators and souped-up PC versions. I know I’d preorder it.
