Silent Hill begins with a car crash. Harry Mason swerves to miss a girl in the road on the way into the town of Silent Hill, and when he comes round his daughter Cheryl has gone from the back seat. He follows a glimpse of her into streets buried in fog, where snow falls and something with wings beats somewhere overhead. The fog had a practical job: the PlayStation could not draw a large 3D town very far into the distance. Edge noticed what Konami did with it. “Where fogging is usually an expedient but intrusive means of hiding any shortcomings in draw distance, the game utilises the effect to heighten tension.”
Fast facts
- Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo (KCET).
- Director: Keiichiro Toyama, directing for the first time. Producer: Gozo Kitao, according to Edge.
- Sound and music: Akira Yamaoka. Computer graphics and characters: Takayoshi Sato.
- Released: PlayStation, early 1999 in North America and Japan; summer 1999 in Europe, at £44.99.
- Main character: Harry Mason, searching for his daughter Cheryl.
- Endings: four, plus a fifth, joke ending on a second play.
Konami’s answer to Resident Evil
The idea came from above. “The original concept actually came from the corporate side; they said we should try our hand at making a horror game,” Toyama told the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine. He knew little about horror, so he studied what people were enjoying and found that modern horror grew out of ordinary, real-world settings. Capcom’s Resident Evil was the obvious comparison, and Toyama drew the line himself. Resident Evil 2, he said, “put aside the horror a bit and went very ‘Hollywood’”, and felt like an action film. “We want to make you scared on an instinctive level.”
He had two aims. One was a world that felt real. The team took influences from Stephen King, David Lynch and David Cronenberg, and on the way home from the E3 show they stopped in Chicago to take photographs. Silent Hill was meant to be an ordinary Midwestern town, and a lakeside resort, so they looked at places near the lake for ideas. The other was technology: “to create this world in full polygons with a free-floating camera that changes a lot to keep the player really unbalanced, and to use a lot of fog effects and lighting effects”. As many as 20 people worked on it at once.
It was not easy. “Our main problem was the PlayStation’s lack of Z-buffering,” Toyama told Edge in 1998: the console had no hardware to sort which surfaces were in front of which, and the problem grew as the team moved the camera around. Sato, who had joined Konami three years before and learned computer graphics on the job, said each second of the full-motion video took three to four hours to render, not counting the modelling. The game has about ten minutes of it.
Fog, darkness and static
Harry spends much of the game seeing very little. By day there is fog and snow; at night and indoors there is only the beam of his torch. Edge found the torchlit scenes “especially claustrophobic”. Monsters respond to noise and light. “The enemy characters have ears and eyes,” Toyama explained, so switching off the torch and keeping quiet made Harry harder to find, though “there’s no guarantee”.
Early in the game Harry finds a pocket radio that hisses with static whenever a monster is near. “The closer the creature, the more insistent the garbled tones,” the Official UK PlayStation Magazine explained, and called it “a simple, yet brilliant idea”. When Harry is hurt, the DualShock controller pulses like a racing heart.
Yamaoka’s soundtrack hardly uses music in the usual sense. The same magazine described “odd collections of noises and repetitive aural effects”, discordant and loud, and thought the sound alone could “scare the life out of you”. Edge called the game “without equal on the PlayStation” for sound.
The town and the Otherworld
The town rewards a close look. Streets are named after horror writers, from Bachman, Stephen King’s pseudonym, to Robert Bloch, who wrote Psycho; a motel is called Norman’s Motel; a shop shutter carries the word “redrum”, from The Shining. The Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine found spoof shops and brands everywhere, and Harry marks each route and locked door on his map as he goes.
At certain points the town turns into the Otherworld, a twisted version of itself where roads and paths become metal platforms. Harry can fight with firearms and clubs, but he is “a more realistic, faintly inept protagonist”, the Official UK PlayStation Magazine wrote, and running away is often wiser. The story, which involves a badly burned girl called Alessa, is told in pieces, and how much of it the player sees depends on what they find. Edge thought it “terrible” by the usual standards but, “in the context of reproducing a nightmare, it’s nearly brilliant”.
Reception
Critics disagreed. Edge gave it eight out of ten and called it “a near-perfect sim nightmare”. The Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine had harsh words for the controls and the grainy graphics but called it a “masterpiece” and compared it with The Exorcist, The Shining and Psycho. The Official UK PlayStation Magazine gave it 10/10: “More frightening than Resident Evil and more evocative than Tomb Raider 3, it’s a landmark game.” Computer and Video Games gave it three stars out of five. It found the game “a let-down” next to Resident Evil, and “in no way scary at all”. Several reviews found the voice acting poor.
The series
Silent Hill 2 (2001) moved to the PlayStation 2, set in the same “fog-smothered town”, as Edge put it, and more sequels followed through the 2000s. In 2009 Climax Studios returned to Harry Mason’s story with Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for the Wii, which Edge described as a reinvention of the first game’s tale. In October 2022 Konami announced several new projects at once, among them Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill: Townfall. Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 came out in 2024, and in June 2025 Konami announced that the studio was remaking the original Silent Hill as well.
Sources
- Edge issue 66, Christmas 1998, pp. 42–45: preview and studio visit (Keiichiro Toyama, Gozo Kitao, Akira Yamaoka, Takayoshi Sato; up to 20 staff; monsters that hear and see; the lack of Z-buffering; ten minutes of computer-generated video and its rendering time; Toyama’s first time as director).
- Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine vol. 2 no. 6, March 1999: review by Joe Rybicki (the fog, the controls, the graininess, the brand spoofs, two good and two bad endings, the comparison with The Exorcist); “Founding Fathers of Silent Hill” interview with Toyama, Yamaoka and Sato from the Tokyo Game Show (the corporate origin, Stephen King, Lynch and Cronenberg, the Midwestern town and the Chicago visit, the fog and the camera, Resident Evil 2).
- Edge issue 70, April 1999, pp. 72–73: review, eight out of ten (developer KCET, the fog quotation, the torchlight, the plot, the sound).
- Official UK PlayStation Magazine issue 48, August 1999, pp. 86–90: review by James Price, 10/10 (Harry and Cheryl, the camera, the sound, the radio, the DualShock heartbeat, the street names, the Otherworld, five endings, £44.99).
- GamesMaster issue 84, August 1999: review (Alessa “severely burnt”; Harry’s map).
- Computer and Video Games issue 213, August 1999, pp. 41–42: review, three stars (the radio, the maps, five endings, “a let-down”, “in no way scary at all”).
- Edge issue 103, November 2001, p. 82: Silent Hill 2 review.
- Edge issue 211, February 2010: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories review (Climax; Wii, PSP and PS2; “Out now (US)”).
- Wireframe issue 69, December 2022, p. 25: Konami’s October 2022 announcements (the Silent Hill 2 remake, Townfall).
- Konami of America press release, “Konami of America introduces gamers to terror-filled town of Silent Hill”, as cited by Wikipedia, “Silent Hill (video game)” (web, secondary): North American release in February 1999 and Japanese release in March 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill_(video_game)
- Game Informer, “Konami teases a remake of the original Silent Hill”, 12 June 2025 (web, secondary): announced at Konami’s Press Start presentation; Bloober Team, “the developer behind last year’s Silent Hill 2 remake”. https://www.gameinformer.com/2025/06/12/konami-teases-a-remake-of-the-original-silent-hill