Why didn’t Silent Hill 2 Remake studio Bloober start by remaking Silent Hill 1? The devs explain | Gaming

When Bloober and Konami announced that they were remaking Silent Hill 2 as part of a comprehensive series reboot, it made immediate if slightly deflating sense to me. Silent Hill 2 is the more feted of the Hills – if I were a calculating franchise custodian tasked with ‘bringing back’ one of the acclaimed original trilogy, that’s probably the instalment I and my spreadsheets would fix upon. I mean, it’s the game with Pyramid Head in it – the nearest thing Silent Hill has to a mascot, and it’s not like there’s an issue of cutting out plot material: each game in the Silent Hill series is, on some level, a distinct story with a distinct protagonist.

Still, the decision to ‘skip’ the first game in the series, whose world, narrative themes, music and art direction set the…