True, the ongoing fight between Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima and publisher Konami isn't fun for anyone, but at least Metal Gear fans will still get The Phantom Pain when it launches in September. For Silent Hill fans, things haven't gone nearly as well.
Back when Silent Hills' demo (nicknamed P.T.) was released, survival horror fans went nuts. It was the most refreshing thing out of the horror genre in years – then, the fight between Kojima and Konami broke out. Not only was P.T. removed from the PlayStation Store entirely, but the entire Silent Hills project was canceled. Despite the fact that Kojima and director Guillermo del Toro were getting along famously, Konami seemingly flushed the entire project down the toilet.
However, for the first time since the game was canceled, Silent Hills fans have received a bit of good news: despite the Konami project being canceled, Kojima and del Toro are still planning on working together.
In an interview with IGN, del Toro stated that he and Kojima were still planning on working together, even if it wasn't Silent Hills:
"I love working with Kojima-san. We are still in touch. We are still friends and working into doing something together, but that's not going to be [Silent Hills]."
To be clear, Silent Hills is gone, and probably forever, unless Konami decides to revive it without Kojima or del Toro, it's not coming back. Even so, just the fact that del Toro and Kojima still plan on working together is cause for celebration – and, in the long run, the Silent Hills name might not be all that important.
For years, the Silent Hill franchise has been on the decline. It's clear that, when the now-canceled project entered development, Konami wanted to revitalize the brand using one of its most well-known creators: Hideo Kojima. However, the resulting product, the Silent Hills demo, was so vastly different from anything else in the franchise that many people wondered why it was a Silent Hills game in the first place.
When you get down to it, the reveal that P.T. was Silent Hills wasn't all that big of a deal – gamers were far more excited about playing something that was truly horrifying than anything else. If Kojima and del Toro decide to tap into that genre yet again, they don't really need Konami's branding or blessing: their game was doing just fine without it.
Granted, there's no way of knowing if Kojima and del Toro plan on creating a horror game once the former is done with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. That being said, it's clear that they were onto something special with Silent Hills and with any luck, fans will still get the horror game they've always wanted.
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