Silent Hill HD Collection - What Happened?

[Music] [Applause] [Music] whoo and welcome to another hauntingly horrific episode of what happened the show where konami fuck'em some of you might remember we'd covered Silent Hill downpour a few months back but I wouldn't blame you if you did it as almost anything related to that game is a rapidly crumbling memory of a forgotten madman with that in mind however Konami has given us no who shortage of monumental tales of mismanagement revolving around their own franchises Metal Gear survive well hop on never dead towards the shadow - what happened any of these contra games what happened but Oh would you look at that yeah so I'm not legally allowed to talk about anything but horror games this month and since the ylim unremarkable tale of homecoming will only dull the senses less instead dig deep into the grave and pull out the Silent Hill HD collection one of the worst ways to experience two absolute classics in the genre of horror now some Silent Hill fans ie most of them cursed just about everyone and everything for giving birth to this collection with the developer who handled said ports as well as then Silent Hill producer Tom Hewlett receiving most of the abuse after doing some research however most of the blame should be directed elsewhere before that though we need to provide at least a shred of context when we hoisted Silent Hill down corn on to our stage we discussed one of its many problems the delay from October of 2011 to March of the next year cryptically Konami never said why this delay occurred here's why originally they wanted all their little Silent Hill ducks in a row releasing in the same month to make the most impact and it was a massive failure right so the viii Simon Hill revelations 32 you did get farted out into the theaters on schedule as konami only had limited control over that but their video game projects had no choice in the matter they were so far away from the finish line that they had to be delayed so instead Konami decided to shift everything over to the most macabre blood-soaked month in the pagan calendar March alrighty the snow is melting the birds are chirping let the month of madness begin fans both new and old would now be able to experience the tension the isolation and the psychological terror provided by two master classes in the genre [Music] so yeah what what happened now upon entering this HD version of Simon hell you might see something stumble out of the choking fog oh okay okay maybe mean fog is a bit generous a light mist let's say so yeah that piteous form would be that of the developer hijinks Studios founded in California hijinks quickly established a working relationship with Konami and were probably chosen to bring Silent Hill into the HD era due to the prestigious franchises they worked on previously such as Karaoke Revolution Karaoke Revolution Glee vol 2 and of course Karaoke Revolution glee volumes the whole idea of a Silent Hill HD was kicked off on konami saw the praise and sales success of the sublime Metal Gear Solid collection as well as the increasing trend of remasters in general within the company projects like these were seen as a fast easy way to squeeze more money out of a pre-existing game or franchise however this type of work isn't something every studio can do case in point hijinks it actually takes a lot of insight and experience in how certain games work to then backwards engineer them to play nice on modern consoles while hijinks had certainly made several games for Konami and specifically for their u.s. branch they actually had zero experience and remastering old titles and the demands and restrictions that were put in place in typical Konami fashion weren't exactly ideal now remember these are two of the most critically lauded horror video games of all time with a rapid slavering fanbase if there are any other Konami characters outside a snake that deserve the best remastering possible its James and Heather in an interview with rely on horror a former staffer who worked on Silent Hill HD opened up about the project and its many many many woes when asked if they were given the appropriate budget resources and time to work on two titles such a prestigious pedigree they stated oh definitely not I imagine that Konami saw this is a very quick and painless way to make some money while HD remaster were popular it ended up taking much longer the intended schedule was a few months but by the end we had spent more than a year on the project see the MGS HDC came out first so I'm not sure about the time they were given but they were almost certainly given a much larger budget I don't imagine Blue Point had the level of trouble we did with SH as Kojima Productions still existed at that time so if Blue Point needed to ask questions or rent any difficulties that resource was there obviously that wasn't an option for us teams silent the collective of talented individuals who had developed the first four silent hill's had been disbanded back in the mid 2000s much to the ire of fans this of course fed into one of the more infamous issues plaguing this project in particular which is what doomed it from the very beginning Konami had lost and/or thrown out the source code for the final gold masters of both Silent Hill 2 & 3 let that just sink in it's ridiculous couldn't possibly be true oh don't worry high jinks Papa Konami has you covered we heroically saved these other non final builds of both games just for you here you go Konami expected this inexperienced fairly young American team to remaster two horror classics with unfinished code they were riddled with bugs missing textures audio issues just about everything you can think of when you think of early build this this town there's something wrong with it both gangs were completable sure but when a lot of your appeal is based on a specific and at times very subtle atmosphere even the smallest audio quirk or way word texture can destroy a lot of what makes Silent Hill game is memorable the anonymous staffer on this particular subject goes on Konami provided the source assets that had been archived after the original release on the PlayStation 2 these were the only assets available and as far as we knew going in the completed final code however after digging into the code and assets it was obvious these were not final who ever archived it must have done it before the final submission or work with incomplete data nobody really knows by virtue of it being so long ago needless to say there are many unfinished elements how can you possibly expect the team who is already lacking experienced complete the job without having all of the canvas or brushes or materials they need well you can if you're a konami [Music] undaunted hijinx plugged away and now had to do way more work than they had originally anticipated if a texture was found to be missing you need to be recreated by the artist from scratch a soundtrack was going to be presented in surround so the audio team spent months remastering every single song with that in mind all of this extra elbow grease of course exponentially increased the time they would need to get the games up to snuff and considering the state of the map on release that's [ __ ] up another issue the former staffer brought up was that unlike Silent Hill the Metal Gear franchise had a presiding figure over it had a Okajima therefore all mgs projects were overseen by Kojima Productions up wait the old Kojima Productions logo not the new okay so a lot of other Konami franchises like contra Castlevania or sparkster had no Rockstar dad to protect them against that's at least one reason why Kojima started to get involved with some of these games in the first place as there were flocks without Shepards God making me so sad let's keep going the voiceovers change literally no one asked for and something that hijinks had zero control over was its own mucky quagmire this is mainly to do with the bad blood between Konami productions and guys see he the voice of James who claimed that in 2010 Konami owed him unpaid residuals for his performance which will lead him to later refused to give his blessing to the new recordings this problem gets a bit complicated as the recasted James Troy Baker chimed in on the issue stating that voice acting contracts simply aren't written like that no one gets paid residuals for their performance as it becometh the property of the company contracting the work you sign on you get paid and that's it when the former hijinks staffer was asked about this they sided with Baker I'm fairly sure they were reissued standard voice contracts was specified that Konami owns all performances without additional compensation regardless of who was at fault it certainly was a blow to the remasters authenticity hijinks however was orbiting outside all this drama they were told to implement the new voices and so they did even being able to wipe their hands of the recasting process however they were still not spared additional problems concerning the audio all right so this this thing is just hijinks weren't able to adjust any of the in-game cutscenes without messing up the code and creating more potential problems so all they could do was manipulate the length of the sound files themselves to best fit the scene which was obviously an imperfect process I guess I really don't care if it's dangerous or not I'm going into town either way the subtitles for the cutscenes were also hard-coded so they couldn't adjust the text to account for any small inflections or added words that might have occurred during the recordings please get to you at all it gets to me alright curiously however the new voiceovers were mandatory in Silent Hill 3 whereas players had the option in Silent Hill 2 which makes little sense given the context all Konami would officially say in regards to this for the Tom Hewlett authored post on the Silent Hill Facebook page unfortunately due to factors both technical and logistical Silent Hill 3 will be presented with new voices only since then sources claim that Konami had simply lost the original recordings for Silent Hill 3 altogether yeah I'll put your shocked faces on but Silent Hill fans did not take kindly to this it's almost as if hijinks were being tortured like they were wandering through rusty grinding hallways being assaulted by new problems at every turn trying to stop them from reaching their goal Konami had to know of all the headaches the project was going through so why on earth was the game released in such a state in the first place since the game had gone so long past its original schedule it just had to come out or be canceled everyone knew how important HD Silent Hill would be to fan so he tried to clean it up as best we could and release it rather than canceling the whole thing it was decided that would come out during the same window as downpour and the Vita game so he fixes many of the issues as we could before the deadline since this was intended to just be a simple release there was no sort of quality control at Konami for game faithfulness and there are no original members of team silent to give the all-clear Akira Yamaoka having quit Konami back in 2009 all the collection needed to do was pass all of Sony and Microsoft certification requirements so longtime fans of the series were taken aback when they encountered dramatically scale back fog ugly textures that were hidden in the original release for now made more due to the HD upscale crashes incorrect sound effects and framerate drops where there were no framerate drops before as a stink broken by almost every quantifiable metric in both presentation performance and atmosphere these ports are considered inferior to their ps2 and Xbox iterations Massa Hiro Ito a former art director team silent was even shown the downgrade on Twitter to which he replied left side is HD isn't it it's poor it's really the released version really a patch was then quickly issued after launch that fixed a small number of problems and a much bigger patch was promised to come to both consoles and fix the rest which turned out to kind of be a massive lie see in the seventh generation most console manufacturers would charge not insignificant fees for publishers to issue patches and a konami z' case they simply didn't want to spend more money fixing the game since the Silent Hill series had a long history with the PlayStation brand it was said brand being a much bigger factor in Japan it's reasonable to assume that Konami wanted to focus on the PlayStation 3 version instead so they just cancelled the 360 patch with the only official word from Konami being that this was due to technical and resource issues you mean money March 2012 the month of madness says Konami called it had to be one of the most dismal failures in trying to reinvigorate a franchise what's more is that book of memories a dungeon crawler for some [ __ ] handheld was then delayed a further six months finally releasing that October why not just delay all three games at that point to actually smooth out the literal thousands of problems and bad PR moves you've already made No as it stands all three of these Silent Hill releases were all put through the wringer review wise posting the lowest scores of the franchise and selling just as poorly the proposed month of madness also killed two out of the three studios associated with it the lone survivor way forward thankfully still going strong in case to miss that implication yes hyejeong studios was closed mere days after the HD collection they tried so hard to salvage hit store shelves sad end to an even sadder tale fortunately however you can download Silent Hill 2 & 3 on the PlayStation stock wait that's that's right Konami never made available of the original version of either game on any digital storefront only Silent Hill 1 but you can get the HD collection via backwards compatibility on Xbox one you know the versions that had their patches cancelled wait this version didn't get passed this is the person I have it's very possible that if you've never played the originals and you don't care about bugs and performance issues the HD collection might be an easy way for you to experience them but I implore you to dig out your ps2 or xbox or if you into the modding scene on pc you can finagle your way into making your own HD remaster if you are so inclined with the outright cancellation and internet scrubbing of Silent Hill as a complete reboot of the franchise with Hideo Kojima Guillermo del Toro and Junjie Ito at the helm Konami not only burned bridges with the fans but pissed out the flames as well so it's really hard to look at the future of the franchise with any degree of positivity that being said just two months ago the company did register for a new Silent Hill trademark but with no additional details at this time remains to be seen what this might wind up being a brand new title another movie maybe another betterer collection while what the final source code still lost the same pitfalls and setbacks that plagued high jinks might again haunt whoever attempts to follow in their footsteps if you know of any other scary sad sacks of scummy scandals rate your suggestions in metaphorical blood in the comments below or take a lonely haunting walk over to the flophouse VIP patreon to officially vote on our next but see you next time and thanks oh so we was all your work [Music] [Music] yeah [Music]

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 983,379

Keywords: Silent Hill HD Collection, Silent Hill, Video Game Disasters, Video Game Documentaries, What Happened?, Wha Happun?, Matt McMuscles, Survival Horror, Konami, PT, Silent Hills, Hideo Kojima, Silent Hill 2

Id: z8CFaxfFA6M

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Mystic8ball]

The fact that there's no proper way to play Silent Hill 2 and 3 on modern systems is a massive shame. It's such an important milestone in survival horror as a genre and SH2 is frequently cited as an example of games as art.

At this point I would even take just a straight up port of the PS2 games on modern systems with no extra bells or whistles, but that's also impossible thanks to Konami losing the source code.

[u/RareBk]

The VA issue goes... way further. Instead of actually acknowledging contract issues, there's a ton of interviews with the new VA's and the new VA director and they're... embarrassing.

Things like them just outright shitting on the original VAs, or saying that their re-recording was going to be much better than the original.

It was really, really gross

[u/MassiveNote]

I’m surprised that this is the first time I’ve seen a video from this series on here. He made a dmc one that was really good that explained a lot of what happened surrounding that game

[u/JW_BM]

It's such a bummer. Silent Hill 3 is incredibly important to me, having helped break me out of a terrible bout of depression in college. Heather is one of my all-time favorite game protagonists.

[u/Divinus]

At this point I'm not sure there's much more that can be said about Silent Hill HD that hasn't already been said, and this video doesn't really do much to add anything of significance to the discourse. It even rehashes the misconception that lost source code was a rare, monumental occurrence. It wasn't. Kingdom Hearts, Panzer Dragoon, many of the Final Fantasy games—damn near all of Japan's games circa 16-bit era were tossed. Japan just wasn't forward-thinking enough to consider that the software they were putting out would have value in the future. It's the same reason why so many recent re-releases and PC ports of old games seem so sub-par. They're not the same games.

That said, if you're out of the loop on this one and looking for more material on the behind the scenes, I recommend The Grate Debate. They've got coverage on a whole hell of a lot of the Tomm Hulett debacle, they've interviewed lead localizer and mo-cap director Jeremy Blaustein, and they've even expounded on what the whole P.T. ordeal might've actually been about. They're good watches.

[u/HIVnotAdeathSentence]

Wasn't the idea for fog, at least in original Silent Hill, a way to get by a low field of view and other limitations? Seems that was carried over to the sequels and visible in the HD Collection.

[u/Shippoyasha]

Sadly that practice of outsourcing the port/remaster to companies ill equipped to make them seems to be still happen occasionally. But more companies have realized that you really need in house expertise to do these classics any justice or use masters of emulation like M2 to do it.

It is probably why retro gaming is going so strong because it is the optimal way to enjoy classics in their original form. Though it can be pricey depending on the game. Even many great emulation options still can't capture the original visual/aural experience right.

[u/I-Have-An-Alibi]

Silent Hill 2 is still the most mentally disturbing game I've ever played. Loved it and it's on my top ten of all time.

• Everyone remembers hiding in the closet while Pyramid Head raped a mannequin in a sink.

[u/CthulhusMonocle]

I would recommend The Real Silent Hill Experience by TwinPerfect to anyone looking for more in-depth information on the Silent Hill series. In depth analysis of the games, providing clear explanation of the lore; as well as intentions of Team Silent all backed by the games themselves and direct quotes from Team Silent. Gives a hearty look into the films, comics, post-Team Silent games, HD Collection, etc. and how they went so horribly wrong.

A series I find very entertaining and informative.