Silent Hill 2 Remake producer says the original Japanese team wanted to update with "drastic changes"
"They don't want people to enjoy the same thing."
Silent Hill 2's original creators "didn't want to make the same thing again" when it came to Silent Hill 2 Remake, causing Remake developer Bloober Team to push back on some of their suggestions.
In an interview with Famitsu, Silent Hill 2 Remake producer Motoi Okamoto – who joined Konami in 2019 to revive the dormant horror series – discussed how Konami and the original developers worked alongside Bloober to find the right "balance" between remaking and reimagining the revered game.
"The Japanese staff who worked on the original version said, 'I want to change this'. But on the other hand, Bloober Team had a lot of opinions like, 'No, I don't want to change this!'" Okamoto said, as translated by Google.
"Although opinions sometimes clash, in the end, we managed to get it right," Okamoto added. "If you watch the trailer, you'll see that it has been reborn in a modern style while retaining the good points of the original version."
Acknowledging that "game creators don't want to make the same thing they created again", Okamoto said: "They don't want people to enjoy the same thing. So, I think there were a lot of parts that they wanted to change drastically in the remake".
"But in the end, thanks to the opinions of Bloober Team – who are big fans of the original [game]– the remake is highly faithful to the original."
Okamoto did assure players, however, that the long walk in through the forest at the beginning of the game "will appear almost unchanged", and as the remake didn't want to use "gamer-like user interfaces", the team removed the UI map in favour of giving James a physical map that he carries with him instead.
Bloober Team says it is "very confident" and "excited" about Silent Hill 2 Remake. In the studio's annual report to shareholders earlier this year, the team expressed its excitement about the highly anticipated remake, stating that it was "very confident about the final result", and acknowledged the success of Silent Hill 2 Remake will be "the most important test" the studio has faced.
Silent Hill 2 Remake is set to release on PC via Steam and PS5 on 8th October, 2024. It was one of gaming's worst-kept secrets before it was formally revealed back in October 2022.