Like most great American towns, Silent Hill has changed, I think. Snow had already turned it gray by the time you’re introduced to it in the first game from 1999, but the next few decades pulled the series into real, bloody purple decay – the original Team Silent development team was defunct by 2007, and Konami made a pachislot spinoff game, for example.
After decades of fan frustration with what seemed like a perfect survival horror series left to die, 2025’s excellent Silent Hill f revived the franchise by transporting it to the Japanese mountainsides, polka-dotted with red flowers and flower monsters. While I think the widely disliked new Return to Silent Hill movie confuses things again – read about it in my Return to Silent Hill review – former Team Silent member and long-serving Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka tells GamesRadar+ he disagrees.
“To me at least, there’s no significant change [in the Silent Hill franchise] since I first got involved 30 years ago,” Yamaoka says to me through an interpreter during a recent interview. “The main reason for that is, at the time, we were trying to create a new experience – a new, totally different approach [to horror].”
“We had strong, original creative ideas for creating the Silent Hill franchise,” Yamaoka remembers, and he feels like Konami has been true to that beginning: “the philosophical approach has been the same.”
With that in mind, Yamaoka says he was “honored” to be the first person director Christophe Gans allowed to watch Return to Silent Hill, including its multiple edits. On his initial watch, he remembers thinking, ‘This really reflects what I have envisioned for Silent Hill 2.'”
And yet it’s difficult to resist the draw of that American town from 30 years ago, softened now by both fog and memory. Yamaoka eventually muses when I ask, “I have a very special feeling about [every protagonist], but if I had to pick [a favorite], probably Harry from the first Silent Hill.”
“We worked together to create the character,” he says. “And we have very wonderful memories of the process. Until then, I don’t recall there being any game where the father tries to find his daughter.”
“We’re catching the beauty within”: Silent Hill legend Akira Yamaoka says horror isn’t as important to the franchise as “emotional complexity.”
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