Renowned Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka has been showcasing his incredible talent for spinning up creepy, spidery music for the series since 1999, but what makes the 2001 Silent Hill 2 soundtrack so remarkable is apparently the attention Yamaoka gave to unmusical matters – like the game's undoubtedly noxious stench.
"With the previous title, the first game, I had set myself the mission of creating something that hadn't existed in game sound or audio until then," Yamaoka explains in a new interview with IGN, according to a translation. "For Silent Hill 2, [...] I also tried to depict things with sound that couldn't be conveyed visually in the game – things like temperature in the game, smells, or the sensation of wind brushing against the character."
The word I'm gravitating to here is "smells." While playing Silent Hill 2, I have often both wondered and tried, uselessly, to suppress the thought, how bad does this stink? Protagonist James, after all, tends to stick his entire forearm into poopy toilet bowls until everything below his elbow looks congealed, and I imagine we've got a serious black mold issue in all of lakeside Silent Hill's damp buildings.
But these questions and the scents they conjure – poop and mold, namely – never deterred Yamaoka. If anything, the awful truths of Silent Hill's rundown motels and putrid hospitals only helped the composer telegraph Silent Hill 2's gameplay through music.
"It wasn't just creative work for me," Yamaoka says of his "goal of conveying non-visual information through music." He thinks "it felt almost like touching something divine, something sacred."
"That's how seriously I took it," he concludes.
5 hours into Silent Hill f, I've picked out the 10 biggest details you need to know.
