Team Silent

~ the obituary ~

Team Silent was not a company. It was a set of people inside Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, the largest of Konami's three development subsidiaries, and the name only became visible to anyone outside because somebody put it in the credits. There was no Team Silent office and no Team Silent payroll. When Konami reorganized in 2005 the group did not get shut down in any formal sense. It stopped having anywhere to be listed.

The group came together around 1996 on a project the company had modest expectations for. Resident Evil had shown that survival horror sold on the PlayStation and Konami wanted one, so the work went to staff who were not on the marquee projects. Keiichiro Toyama directed it and Akira Yamaoka did the sound, which he would go on doing for every one of them. Takayoshi Sato had been hired junior and ended up building the character models and the pre-rendered cutscenes after arguing his way into the job. Silent Hill shipped in 1999.

What the hardware could not do turned into the thing everyone remembers. The PlayStation could not draw a town at any real distance, so the team filled the far ground with fog and the near ground with a flashlight cone, and the player walked around inside a radius of about ten meters for eight hours. The fog was a workaround for a polygon budget. Silent Hill 2 kept it two years later on a PlayStation 2 that could have drawn the whole town.

~ the case file ~

~ the four games ~

Silent Hill 2 arrived on PlayStation 2 in September 2001 and is the one that made the argument. It dropped the cult plot almost entirely and gave a man a letter from his dead wife, and every monster in it was built to mean something about him rather than about the town. Masahiro Ito designed those monsters. Silent Hill 3 in 2003 went back to the first game's story, and Silent Hill 4: The Room in 2004 started life as a different project and got the name attached during development.

None of this was a thing you could get easily in Turkey at the time. The PlayStation 2 existed here, at import prices, in a market where the real gaming machine for anyone my age was a PC and the real distribution channel was a copied disc. Silent Hill 2 got discussed on Turkish forums in those years mostly by people working from magazine coverage rather than from a save file.

~ the share swap ~

On 1 April 2005 Konami folded Konami Computer Entertainment Studio, Konami Computer Entertainment Japan, Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo and Konami Online back into the parent corporation. The stated reason was efficiency and faster decisions. Shareholders in KCES got 0.42 Konami shares each and KCEJ holders got 0.81, while KCET was swapped one for one, which tells you which subsidiary the parent thought was worth the most.

Nobody was fired that day. The people scattered anyway, at the pace people scatter when the unit they identified with no longer appears anywhere. Toyama had already gone to Sony, where he made Siren, and Ito left in 2006. Yamaoka stayed through several more Silent Hill projects as a sound director for hire before joining Grasshopper Manufacture in 2010.

~ who got the keys after ~

Konami's position was that the series should be made by Western developers for a Western audience, and it acted on that for a decade. Climax Studios in England did Origins in 2007 and Shattered Memories in 2009. Double Helix in California did Homecoming, and Vatra in the Czech Republic did Downpour in 2012. Several of those are better than their reputation, and none of them settled the argument, because the argument was never really about which country the studio sat in.

The 2024 Silent Hill 2 remake by Bloober Team sold well and was received warmly, which is a strange kind of verdict on all of it. A studio in Krakow rebuilt, line by line, a game made by people Konami stopped employing as a group in 2005.

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