Though parent company Konami, which had recently been taken over by new owners, wanted to create a game that emulated Hollywood conventions in order to break into the American market, Team Silent within the Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo Studio, under director Keiichiro Toyama, wanted to produce a video game that would affect the player emotionally and psychologically. Specifically, it shaped and developed the growing trend of psychological horror within survival horror video games, which characteristically encompassed a third-person view, some combat and use of weaponry, and a much greater emphasis on puzzle-solving and exploration than previous horror fare.
Like Resident Evil and Dino Crisis, Silent Hill was developed for the PlayStation, and utilized a multi-genre approach to create its extensive world in addition to elements of the metroidvania sub-genre of the action-adventure game, it was considered a staple in survival horror. Many elements from this game-the mansion setting, mystery solving and regular threats to fight or evade-appeared in the hugely successful later Resident Evil series.
Special mention must be given to Sweet Home (1989), the Japanese role-playing game based on the horror film of the same name and released for the Nintendo, as a forerunner to the survival horror genre. This list largely consists of point-and-click games that were mostly designed for MS-DOS and/or Microsoft Windows. This was something of a rarity in the horror video gaming universe when Silent Hill was released, with earlier examples including: Dark Seed (1992) System Shock (1994) Dark Seed II (1995) I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1995) Phantasmagoria (1995) Sanitarium (1998) Resident Evil (1996) Dino Crisis (1999) and System Shock 2 (1999). Gamers were captivated by the mystery of the character-driven and convoluted story within the prologue. With these cryptic words, accompanied by the first rattling notes of the haunting theme song from Akira Yamaoka, fans of horror video gaming knew that Silent Hill (1999) was something special. “The fear of blood tends to create fear of the flesh.”
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