Bloober Team May Be Working On One of Two New Silent Hill Games
Bloober Team, the developer behind Observer and January's The Medium, has hinted it's working on an existing horror IP from "a very famous gaming publisher," and fans believe the studio is referring to Silent Hill and Konami. If that's true, Video Games Chronicle reports it won't be the only studio doing so.
Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno told GamesIndustry.biz he and his team had been working for more than a year on the project.
(2/2) the one I'm permitted to say is Supermassive Games, but neither got the job.
— AestheticGamer aka Dusk Golem (@AestheticGamer1) February 18, 2021
I had assumed one game got canned somewhere in dev, that's not unusual, but more recently with a few others I have been hearing that both games may very much still be in dev. To see, though.
"I can't tell you who [the publisher is]," he said. "I can't tell you what the project is, but I'm pretty sure when people realize we're working on it, they will be very excited."
These cryptic hints combined with reports that Konami has pitched the IP to various developers in recent years and Bloober's ties to Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka (who worked on The Medium) have fans speculating Bloober's next project will be a Silent Hill game. Yamaoka appeared in a video by YouTube channel AI Hub in which he reportedly described his next project as "the one you've been hoping to hear about." That video is no longer publicly available.
Meanwhile, VGC reports that Konami has already outsourced a Silent Hill project to an unnamed but prominent Japanese developer that will be revealed in summer 2021. VGC suggests the two projects might attempt different reboots of the franchise. Industry insider Ryan Stanford says Konami shopped a soft reboot and an episodic game of Silent Hill in 2018, providing a plausible explanation for the two games' being developed simultaneously and independent of one another.
Stanford and VGC's sources both say Dark Pictures development studio Supermassive were approached for a Silent Hill game, but the project never received a green light.
Separate VGC sources indicated the Japanese Silent Hill project would be a departure from past games in the series.