Silent Hill 2’s original devs wanted to make more changes to the remake, but Bloober Team resisted

The Silent Hill 2 remake would have had more changes made to it, if the original game’s creators had their way.

That’s according to Motoi Okamoto, the producer of the remake, who spoke about the making of the game in a new Famitsu interview.

Okamoto says that some of the original Silent Hill 2 staff wanted to make numerous changes, but Bloober Team – the studio handling the remake – challenged some of the requests.

After being asked if it was difficult to strike a baance between adding something new while retaining the best elements of the original, Okamoto replied: “That’s right.”

“But actually,” he added (as translated by VGC), “the Japanese staff, including Masahiro Ito, the designer who worked on the original version, and Akira Yamaoka, the sound designer, said ‘we want to change this part’, while on the other hand Bloober Team often replied saying ‘no, we don’t want to change this’!

“Sometimes the opinions clashed, but in the end I think we managed to get it right. I think you’ll see in the latest trailer that while it’s been reborn in a modern style, we’ve retained the good qualities of the original version.”

When asked why the original staff were so keen to make changes to the game, Okamoto suggested that they perhaps wanted to use the opportunity to mix things up instead of retracing their steps.

“After all, game creators don’t want to make the same thing they created all over again,” he said. “They don’t want to have people playing the same thing. That’s why there were a lot of things they wanted to completely change in the remake.

“But in the end, thanks to the opinons of Bloober Team, who are big fans of the original, the remake ended up being highly respectful of the original game. If we had formed a development team entirely in Japan, it might have turned out to be a completely different remake.”

The Silent Hill 2 remake has been the subject of much debate since its announcement, with a second trailer in January 2024, which focused on combat, doing nothing to quell it.

At the time, Bloober Team president Piotr Babieno said the trailer “does not reflect the spirit of the game”, saying the marketing side of things was Konami‘s responsibility.

More recently, Konami shared 13 minutes of Silent Hill 2 remake footage, but each video continues to divide players, with YouTube likes and dislikes generally evening out.