Konami is “potentially porting” the Silent Hill series to current-gen consoles

Konami is reportedly “potentially porting” the Silent Hill series to contemporary consoles.

That’s according to one of five short documentaries Konami published on YouTube the night it shadow-dropped The Short Message.

In the fourth video, a level designer who worked on the highly-anticipated (and long rumoured) playable teaser revealed that Konami had originally reached out to the team at Hexadrive – a studio that had primarily worked on porting older games until it helped an internal Konami team develop The Short Message – “about potentially porting the Silent Hill series”.

Rika Miyatani, level design director at Hexadrive, said their studio initially got involved with Konami after it unsuccessfully pitched to lead the Silent Hill 2 Remake.

As we now know, Konami passed on that pitch in favour of Polish horror developer Bloober Team, but Miyatani says just six months later, Konami got back in touch to discuss The Short Message.

“Everyone, including myself, who were part of that discussion were big Silent Hill fans, so, internally, people started talking, and we said, ports would be nice too, but what we’d really like to see is a Silent Hill remade for current-gen consoles,” Miyatani said, as transcribed by Eurogamer.

There’s been no other mention of porting the original Silent Hill titles to current-gen systems, nor any indication of which games, specifically, Konami was looking to port. But Miyatani’s words made it all the way to the Konami-sanctioned documentary series.

If true, it won’t be the first time Konami attempts to revive the original games. Back in 2012 – during Konami’s self-coined “Summer of Silent Hill” – the publisher worked with Hijinx Studios to bring Silent Hill 2 and 3 to PS3 and Xbox 360. However, missing source code and the decision to record new voice work – all wrongly attributed to Silent Hill’s then beleaguered producer, Tomm Hulett – resulted in an astonishingly poor showing in which characters had teeth where they eyes should have been (no, not intentionally) and the framerate dropped to the speed of a Powerpoint presentation at times.

We’ve reached out to Konami for comment and will update as soon as we hear back.

Silent Hill: The Short Message – Konami’s oft-leaked “contemporary psychological horror” spin on its long-dormant series that focusses on a younger, more contemporary cast – was finally official unveiled at this week’s State of Play.