With Silent Hill 2 remake, Silent Hill f, Silent Hill: Townfall and more — and through bold partnerships with the likes of No Code, Annapurna, and Ryukishi07 — Konami is back as a creative force in games after a disastrous 7 years
Prior to yesterday’s Silent Hill Transmission showcase, it was widely accepted that Konami, as a video game publisher, had fallen from grace to a state of near-total irrelevance. It feels like we’ve been making jokes for years about the primacy of this onetime jukebox rental business’ many sidelines, which include casinos and health clubs. Konami hasn’t helped itself with seemingly desperate lunges at the latest tech trends, such as NFTs and metaverse development. Its last major game launch — 2021’s eFootball, a rebranding of its ailing Pro Evolution Soccer series — was an unmitigated disaster.
Most of Konami’s woes date back to 2015, a year that will live in infamy for fans of the 1980s and ’90s greats that made the company’s name: Gradius, Castlevania, Contra, Suikoden, and, of course, Metal Gear. 2015 was the year that Konami canceled Silent Hills, a reboot of its prized horror series by Hideo Kojima and film director Guillermo del Toro; permanently pulled Silent Hills’ acclaimed playable teaser P.T. from the PlayStation Store, making it almost completely inaccessible if you didn’t already have it installed; and conducted a protracted and undignified break-up with its star creator Kojima that included removing his name from promotional materials for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain and forbidding him from accepting an award for it at The Game Awards.
At the same time, new games boss Hideki Hayakawa was suggesting a shift away from console games toward mobile development, the company was restructuring to drain power away from individual studios like Kojima Productions, and the Japanese press was laying into its reputation as an employer.
It’s certainly possible that Kojima had previously been over-indulged at Konami. But the damage done to the publisher’s reputation with players — not to mention to its ability and indeed willingness to make games — was severe. Aside from the general apathy toward 2018’s misguided Metal Gear Survive and the barely remembered 2019 Contra game Contra: Rogue Corps, the clearest example of this is that the Silent Hill brand has lain fallow for an entire decade.
