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- DAHLIA SILENT HILL SHATTERED MEMORIES MOVIE
- DAHLIA SILENT HILL SHATTERED MEMORIES SERIES
- DAHLIA SILENT HILL SHATTERED MEMORIES PSP
Swapping out the series’ traditional foggy setting for a frozen world of snow and ice, Cold Heart’s story was based on a psychologically traumatised university student named Jessica as she explored the eerie town of Silent Hill.Ĭonstructed with melee combat and puzzles, it featured dynamic sub-zero environments which required the player to scavenge food and clothing to keep their body temperature up. When Brahms PD failed to find traction with Konami’s higher-ups, Climax decided to put together another pitch for an original Wii outing that it named Silent Hill: Cold Heart. Inspired by his involvement in the interactive fiction community in the late 1990s, Barlow wanted the game to respond to players, not just to the choices they made but also to how they played the game. Based on your responses, it would analyse your personality type and change the game’s content accordingly – creating a wraparound nightmare tailored for each player. The pitch became Brahms PD, a spinoff from the main franchise that cast players as an amnesiac police detective on the Brahms force looking for their missing partner.īilled as “the world’s first truly interactive psychological horror,” Brahms PD planned to use in-game sessions with a police psychiatrist to analyse the player. He was eager to make a Wii-based firstperson shooter, and invited Climax to pitch for it. However, Silent Hill’s US producer, William Oertel, was pushing his own, rather unlikely, pet project.
DAHLIA SILENT HILL SHATTERED MEMORIES PSP
It very much just kind of meandered.”Īfter Silent Hill: Origins’ release in 2007, Konami wanted to follow it up with another PSP title. “It wasn’t like right back at the start we just pitched what became the game and everyone came on board. “The project that ended up on the shelves would never have been signed off by anyone up front,” Barlow says of the total overhaul of the classic Silent Hill formula. Along the way it lost several key Silent Hill touchstones (including the combat and the doomsday cult mythology) and gained a new gameplay element – a data-driven, under-the-hood system that psychologically profiled players as they played. Instead, it evolved through several pitches under the watchful eye of a producer who wanted to revive the flagging survival horror series’s fortunes. In fact, it didn’t even start life as Shattered Memories. The project that became Silent Hill: Shattered Memories didn’t start off on Wii. Although no one knew it at the time, the Japanese-originated, American-set Silent Hill franchise had just found a new home in the UK.Īlthough the story of Climax and Silent Hill began at Climax LA in Santa Monica, a UK team developed Shattered Memories When it shipped in November 2007, Silent Hill: Origins won Climax a substantial dose of publisher goodwill.
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With the clock ticking, Barlow rewrote the script, redesigned the levels and remade the creatures in just a week. ’ Konami said, ‘You can change everything, but you’ve got to do it in the same time and budget.’” “It was supposed to be a dark comedy and, at some point, someone said Scrubs was ! We pushed back and said, ‘Look, if this goes out, it will be a disaster. “It was bizarre,” says the designer of the game they inherited. After problems with the engine and a confused high-level vision for the game, Barlow’s UK team were drafted in to pick up the pieces. Initially, Origins was being developed at Climax LA in Santa Monica, but it was a troubled project. It also gave Sam Barlow and his team a chance to save the day. It was the game that convinced Konami that the Portsmouth-based studio represented a safe pair of hands. To understand the origin of Shattered Memories, you have to go right back to Silent Hill: Origins on PSP in 2007.
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DAHLIA SILENT HILL SHATTERED MEMORIES MOVIE
“The pitch from us was always, ‘How many people own a Wii? How many of those people have enjoyed watching a horror movie or psychological thriller?’ We thought there were quite a lot of people we could sell this game to.” “We thought, this is a chance for us to engage with what is potentially quite a large audience,” remembers Sam Barlow, lead designer at Climax Studios.
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Released in December 2009 on Nintendo Wii, Shattered Memories was a bold – some might say foolhardy – attempt to take Silent Hill to a brand-new demographic: casual players. But the most shocking thing about it wasn’t its monsters. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories made no bones about wanting to terrify you. Concepts for the Raw Shocks revolved around 'cancerous', 'sexy', 'frostbite' and, as in the above, 'abstract' variantsįaceless zombies. Shattered Memories' menagerie of monsters could have leapt straight out of a Francis Bacon canvas.
DAHLIA SILENT HILL SHATTERED MEMORIES SERIES
How a British studio made the most innovative entry in the Silent Hill series Making of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
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