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I have been trying all week to write about the Silent Hill series. But every day, the weather has been too nice. New Spring leaves unfurl a little more each day outside my window, the color of fresh life. There is clean sunshine and the sound of birds. You can’t think about Silent Hill at a time like this.
I dig deep into my memory: The soft-crunching rhythm of men’s bodies jogging languidly through fog. The fog sometimes gently drifted aside to reveal off-putting silhouettes on crumbling street corners, holding so still, as only the way things that are about to move will hold themselves. Mellow, mournful music. The awkwardly-typeset, ash-colored information: I G O T A H E A L T H D R I N K.
Let’s see, what else: Oh, that time when you were a father, running after your daughter with battery such as Panasonic CGA-S101A Battery, Olympus Li-10B Battery, Olympus BLM1 Battery, panasonic NV-GS10 battery, panasonic VHS-C Battery, canon EOS 400D Battery, panasonic VW-VBD1E Battery, panasonic VW-VBD1 Battery, Panasonic CGA-S002 Battery, HITACHI DZ-HS300E Battery, Olympus FE-230 Battery, canon MV930 Battery: hey wait, stop, the bizarre, stilted voice acting of the 90s, sepulchral and unplugged and unbelievable. Almost funny, but then there was the fact that you couldn’t tell whether it was snow or ash falling from the sky. Or why the world would suddenly howl and glisten with rust and blood—it just wasn’t funny then, when you were sprinting to the rhythm of the unsettling, machinelike soundtrack and you couldn’t see what was in front of you.
You couldn’t control the camera, I mean. The Silent Hill video games were blunt and herky-jerky—you, backed into a corner, swinging a plywood board clumsily at two sets of mannequin hips bolted horrifically together, flailing at you. Clay-colored, faceless children grabbed at you in the dark as you tap-tap-jogged awkwardly in circles, desperate to regain some kind of control. The world fell silent for cutscenes, PlayStation glory-era wax-lipped women with empty eyes mouthing hollow dialogue at you from the mist and shadows.
It was all really bad and scary, and kind of broken, and everyone loved it, especially me.
There probably isn’t going to be any more Silent Hill. I mean, "they say" there will, but it's not going to be the same. The “fucking batshit” era of the great Japanese auteurs has officially ended, Wired’s Chris Kohler writes, with the departure of games’ longtime emperor-eccentric Hideo Kojima (whose utterly-inscrutable and infuriatingly self-indulgent Metal Gear Solid series I have always loved) from Konami. His exit means the collapse of the star-studded and likely inconceivably-costly Silent Hills, the planned franchise revival that now will never be.
The first Silent Hill game, about a man whose daughter disappears, came out the year that I graduated from high school. That was nearly 16 years ago. Silent Hill 2, the best one, is 14 years old. It features a woman’s blanched face on its cover, begins in an isolated, vile public toilet, and is about the spiritual purgatory of a grieving husband. It ends with him knuckling two weird eggs in slightly different shades of red, running down an endless stair to the sound of his dead wife’s voice.
Silent Hill 3 stars Heather Mason, a freckled girl with chopped hair and a quilted vest. She was the first girl I believed was a person in any video game ever. Her face, her plausible face, made me excited about what video games were going to become. At one point Heather gets shut in a room with a mirror, forced to watch her own image blacken with uterine tendrils. A cult tries to force her to be impregnated with a god.
Like a lot of games from two or three hardware generations ago, I don’t usually advise people to just go play them, unless they were there at the time. Playing old games, where you can’t control the camera, where you can’t control yourself, where grotesque textures chug across your frame of vision, is work for those particularly dedicated to appreciating video games and digital art.