By the time Team Silent’s fourth and final horror effort was nearing release, the gaming landscape had changed significantly, mostly due to one thing: Resident Evil 4, a ground-up reinvention of the horror genre that kicked survival horror to the curb in favor of faster-paced “survival action”. While Silent Hill 4 came out several months earlier, Resident Evil 4’s huge departure from its roots and innovative gameplay had already been well established by pre-release coverage in the gaming press, and as a result Konami found themselves in the unenviable position of releasing a game that suddenly looked outdated and old-fashioned.

To be fair, Silent Hill 4 was by far the biggest departure from the formula established in Silent Hill 1, mixing up a number of mechanics and traditional elements that had been faithfully carried over across two sequels. Was it enough to make Team Silent’s swan song stand out compared to Capcom’s coming blockbuster?

Warning: If you intend to play the 2024 remake and haven’t played this original version, I recommend skipping this post for now

During the 2001 Tokyo Game Show audiences were treated to the first ever trailer for Silent Hill 2, the eagerly awaited sequel to the original Playstation game. As the franchise was making the jump to the relatively newly minted Playstation 2 expectations were high to see what Team Silent could pull off with the improved hardware.

Instead of actually showing the game, Konami decided to unveil the new title with a series of strange, horrifying CG trailers that pushed the already grotesque imagery of the first game into the stratosphere. They were far darker than anything anyone had seen before and featured disturbing overtones of misogyny and sexual violence that seem pretty edgy by today’s standards but was even more so at the time.

This was all a pretty big hint that Silent Hill 2 wasn’t going to be quite what anyone was expecting.