Silent Hill Townfall director Jon McKellan says Konami did not let the dev team know about all of the other Silent Hill projects that were in the works concurrently.
After about a decade in the bin, with the wound of the Hideo Kojima-led Silent Hills being cancelled still fresh on the minds of horror fans, Konami decided it was back. This happened in a single stream announcing Silent Hill 2 Remake, Silent Hill f, Silent Hill: Townfall, and the duo of things we didn't know would be awful at the time – Silent Hill Ascension and Return to Silent Hill.
While the Bloober Team collab on Silent Hill 2 was long-rumored, the announcement of three other Silent Hill games (if you can call Ascension a game?) was a total shock for a franchise that had been as dead as whatever James Sunderland most recently bashed with a big stick.
Speaking at MCM London Comic Con (via VGC) McKellan – the founder of Screen Burn – revealed how he and the development team first found out that there were other Silent Hill games in the works alongside Townfall, saying, "We found out about a lot of those projects when everyone else did. When they announced them." He adds, "we were kind of kept in the dark, which was kind of exciting as a fan to not see behind the curtain too much."
Even after the cats were out of the bag, Konami didn't give the team much insight into what the others were doing either. McKellan says, "[Motoi] Okamoto-san, who's the series producer, was very keen to not let projects influence each other, and not compromise too much." Even without the knowledge of other games in development, if there was too much crossover, the Konami team would step in, he explains.
"They'd not necessarily tell us what it was, but just be like 'there's another thing that's doing something similar, so maybe veer off from that direction.'"
Despite Konami's wishes to keep the three games unique, McKellan stresses it wasn't a restrictive environment either, saying, "It wasn't like a Marvel phase where it would be like 'know your slot and stay within that.'" He adds, "We got to be very creatively free, just with the knowledge that Konami and the team there would step in if they felt they had to."
So what did get changed through this process? Not much from the sounds of things. "I think only once did we have a thing," McKellan explains, "they felt 'this is maybe a little too close, you may want to pivot and just go in a different option' for one of the enemy designs."
