Silent Hill: Origins (Climax LA)

Date: 2006
Developer: Climax LA

Initially, Silent Hill: Origins (working title – Original Sin^[1]) was being developed by Climax LA in Santa Monica, California, but it was a troubled project. After major problems with the engine and high-level vision by October 2006 the game's development was handed to Climax UK team lead by Sam Barlow.

"It was bizzare. It was supposed to be a dark comedy and, at some point, someone said Scrubs was the inspiration! We pushed back and said, 'Look, if this goes out, it will be a disaster. There's a hardcore fanbase [of Silent Hill players]." Konami's response was "You can change everything, but you've got to do it in the same time and budget."^[2]

With limited time, Barlow rewrote the script, redesigned the levels and remade the creatures in just a week.

"The first Silent Hill game we worked on, Origins, was started by a different group of people, and it was in a terrible state. When we took it over, I think we had six months to finish it, and they'd already spent half the money. So we were told to just finish the thing. But me, and particularly the lead artist Neale Williams, were thinking: aren't Silent Hill games usually really good?

We didn't wanna make the first bad Silent Hill game. Not just bad, but awful. Especially when it was an origin story—which was a terrible idea, by the way. The first Silent Hill already tells an origin story. We had very little room to manoeuvre, but we did our best. And part of doing our best was not in any way attempting to change the classic structure. The story would be told by the environment, and through diaries. You'd feel like you were picking them up randomly and out of order, but it was clearly intended by us to deliver a certain emotional heft.

We were locked into some cliched stuff when we started work on the project. There was a level set in an asylum, but there was no reason for you being there. You were just randomly walking through an asylum. We thought this location should probably tie into the character's story, so we set it up so that the last piece of paperwork you find is a log of your mother being admitted there, and a doctor's note about how well she was doing. And suddenly it was so much more poignant. I enjoyed doing that."^[3]

The gameplay videos of this early prototype showed significant innovations in the series like Resident Evil 4-type camera view and laser sight for the guns as the main character was combating monsters dubbed the Afflicted all of which not used in the final release. A list of original locations included a decaying hotel, an asylum where Dahlia was comitted and Dr. Kaufmann had his lab to produce the drug, The Orpheum theater, a meat packing plant and a series of catacombs, previously the mining tunnels, leading to the final location in the game – the cult's lair. ^[4]

Original map

Another major concept scrapped from the final version of the game was the barricade system allowing players to block off rooms from enemies using objects around them to get some reprieve.

Play: Can you tell us a little more about the barricade system we've heard about? Does it become necessary to block off access to enemies to proceed?
Oertel: That was the original plan...that enemies would chase after you and you'd have to trap them in other rooms to be able to proceed. It was almost going to be a kind of puzzle element. It proved to be very difficult to implement. The design would have taken a lot of time, so that part is no longer in the game. It would have been a nice feature to have, but we just ran out of time. It was either...we could have a great barricade game, or a great Silent Hill game (laughs).^[5]

Silent Hill: Origins was eventually completed by Climax UK (Solent) and released in November 2007.

Videos

Game's development history along with some gameplay footage and concept art / story by PtoPOnline

Silent Hill Next video seemingly leaked in April 2006, predating E3 2006

Early pre-production trailer for the game that would become Silent Hill Origins. It is essentially concept art and other early work hastily put together, with some elements of this being used in a later trailer