OG Silent Hill Is Coming Back Free On Modern Platforms

Silent Hill owners will soon be able to upgrade to a free remaster of the game on PC.

We’ve previously covered decompilation efforts to bring retro and console-exclusive games to the PC platform.

These kinds of projects open up more possibilities to preserve games and make them widely available for wider audiences, provided that you already own the original software.

It looks like the next game to get this treatment will be Silent Hill, the original survival horror game which was only ever released on the Sony PlayStation back in 1999.

Despite its sequels making their way over to PC and other platforms outside of the PlayStation, it’s only ever been possible to play the original Silent Hill on PS1.

However, as shared by Video Game Esoterica, the Silent Hill decompilation project has nearly hit 100%, and it looks like two different developers are working on making an unofficial PC port from this.

VGE shares some gameplay footage from one of these projects, showing around ten minutes of gameplay from the opening level.

KONAMI

Silent Hill 1's Unofficial PC Port Is Still In-Progress, But Early Efforts Are Proving To Have Big Potential

Because the project is still not yet complete, there are certain aspects of the PS1 that have been left in, such as references to “memory card slots” and PS1-style controls.

It also uses the PS1’s graphics, though as VGE notes, texture packs and mods released in the future will be able to take care of that, potentially adding in modern graphics and models to give it a bit of a facelift.

One of the main caveats to this project is that you’ll need your own copy of Silent Hill to run it. We don’t condone pirating your games to do this, so make sure that you do this using the correct legal method.

The decompilation project essentially converts the game’s encrypted codebase into something readable, so it doesn’t actually include any of the original assets, hence why you’ll need your own copy.

So, you’ll need to grab your PS1 disc of Silent Hill and extract the contents of it onto your PC, which is pretty easily done these days thanks to software like ImgBurn that’ll do it for you.

You can download an in-progress version of the decompilation from GitHub, but we’d recommend waiting for one when the project is fully decompiled and a developer has gone through the effort of making a proper unofficial PC port.

If you’re impatient though, you’re welcome to try this version. Just beware that you will almost certainly run into some issues when playing the game.

Originally released in 1999, Silent Hill was the debut title of Team Silent, the team within Konami which would be known for developing Silent Hill games.

It worked on the series between 1996 and 2007 before being disbanded by Konami, who wanted to outsource the series to Western developers. And we all know how that went.

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