Silent Hill: Қорқыныш пен Жұмбақ Алаңы

1999 video game

Silent Hill (サイレントヒル, Sairento Hiru) is a 1999 survival horror game developed by Team Silent, a group in Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo and published by Konami. The first installment in the video game series Silent Hill, the game was released exclusively for the PlayStation. Silent Hill uses a third person view, with real time rendering of 3D environments. To mitigate limitations of the console hardware, developers used fog and darkness to muddle the graphics and the pop ins, which in return helped set up the atmosphere and mystery of the game. Unlike earlier survival horror games that focused on protagonists with combat training, the player character of Silent Hill is an "everyman". The game follows Harry Mason as he searches for his missing adopted daughter in the eponymous fictional American town of Silent Hill; stumbling upon a cult conducting a ritual to revive a deity it worships, he discovers her true origin. Five game endings are possible, depending on actions taken by the player, including one joke ending. Silent Hill received positive reviews from critics on its release and was commercially successful. It is considered by many to be one of the greatest video games ever made, as well as a defining title in the survival horror genre, as it moved away from B movie horror elements toward a more psychological horror style, emphasizing atmosphere.|200x200px]]

The objective of the player is to guide main protagonist and player character Harry Mason through a monster filled town as he searches for his lost daughter, Cheryl. Silent Hills gameplay consists of combat, exploration, and puzzle solving. The game uses a third person view, with the camera occasionally switching to other angles for dramatic effect, in pre scripted areas. This is a change from older survival horror games, which constantly shifted through a variety of camera angles with the use of pre rendered backgrounds. Because Silent Hill has no heads up display, the player must consult a separate menu to check Harry's "health". If a DualShock controller is used, a heart beat rhythm can be felt signifying that the player is at low health. Harry confronts monsters in each area with both melee weapons and firearms. An ordinary man, Harry cannot sustain many blows from enemies, and gasps for breath after sprinting. A portable radio collected early in the game alerts Harry to the presence of nearby creatures with bursts of static, although players can choose to turn off the radio if they want. The player finds a flashlight early in the game, the light beam illuminates only a short distance. Like the radio the player can choose to turn off the light if they want, making the game darker but in return the monsters have a more difficult time of finding the player. Harry can later rescue Kaufmann from a monster, discover evidence of his role in local drug trafficking, and stumble upon his hidden bottle of aglaophotis, a supernatural liquid that can exorcise demons. Harry meets Cybil again and comes to believe that a darkness is transforming the town into someone's nightmare, which is why the inhabitants have mostly disappeared. Cybil says that Dahlia must be on drugs. Dahlia urges him to stop "the demon" responsible for it—the girl in the road who appears to him sporadically—or Cheryl will die. Continuing his search, Harry is drawn into a fight with Cybil, who has become the host to a supernatural parasite; the player can choose to save her using the red liquid they found at the hospital. The next time Harry sees the girl, the Flauros automatically activates and neutralizes her telekinetic powers. Dahlia appears and reveals that she manipulated Harry into catching the girl—an apparition of her daughter, Alessa. Harry passes out. He awakens in the hospital, next to Lisa. Lisa explains that she experienced a sense of déjà vu while in the basement, and when he finds her again, she despairs that she is "the same as them". She pleads with Harry to save her and desperately grabs him, which causes Harry to instinctively push her away as blood starts to run down her face; horrified, he flees. As he blocks the door outside, he hears Lisa crying, which makes Harry re enter the room. Her diary is all that remains and it reveals that she nursed Alessa during a secret, forced hospitalization. Alessa's never healing wounds terrified her, as she fell deeper into a drug addiction fueled by Kaufmann. Finding Dahlia with Alessa's defeated apparition and charred body, Harry demands to know Cheryl's whereabouts: he discovers that seven years earlier, Dahlia conducted a ritual to force Alessa to birth the cult's deity; Alessa survived being immolated because her status as vessel rendered her immortal, while her mental resistance to the ritual caused her soul to be bisected, preventing the birth. One half manifested as the infant Cheryl, whom Harry and his wife adopted. Dahlia casts a spell to lure Cheryl back, while Alessa was imprisoned within the hospital, enduring unceasing agony as a result of her injuries. With Alessa's plan thwarted and her soul rejoined, the deity is revived and possesses her.

Development of Silent Hill started in September 1996. Konami sought to produce a game that would be successful in the United States. For this reason, a Hollywood like atmosphere was used for Silent Hill. According to composer Akira Yamaoka, the developers did not know how to proceed with the Silent Hill project, either. As the time passed, the personnel and management of Konami lost their faith in the game, and the members of Team Silent increasingly felt like outsiders. Despite the profit oriented approach of the parent company, however, the developers of Silent Hill had much artistic freedom because the game was still produced as in the era of lower budget 2D titles. Eventually, the development staff decided to ignore the limits of Konami's initial plan, and to make Silent Hill a game that would appeal to the emotions of players instead. For this purpose, the team introduced a "fear of the unknown" as a psychological type of horror. The plot was made vague and occasionally contradictory to leave its true meaning in the dark, and to make players reflect upon unexplained parts. while programmer Hiroyuki Owaku wrote the text for the riddles. Toyama did not have much experience of horror movies but was interested in UFOs, the occult and David Lynch films which influenced the game's development. Toyama questioned Konami's decision to appoint him as director, as he had never been one prior to Silent Hill. The localization company Latina International translated the script into English. The town of Silent Hill is an interpretation of a small American community as imagined by the Japanese team. It was based on Western literature and films, as well as on depictions of American towns in European and Russian culture. Instead of relying on illustrations, Sato conceived the characters of Silent Hill while creating their computer generated models. Although Sato was largely responsible for the game's cinematics and characters at this point, his superior still did not want to fully credit his work, and intended to assign a visual supervisor to him. To prevent this from happening, Sato volunteered to create the full motion videos of Silent Hill by himself. and included a demo with its stealth game Metal Gear Solid in Japan. The names and designs of some Silent Hill creatures and puzzles are based on books enjoyed by the character of Alessa, including The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The game contains several real life references, particularly in characters' names. Cheryl Mason's first name is based on actress Sheryl Lee's first name, and Lisa Garland's surname is taken from actress Judy Garland. Harry's name was originally "Humbert", and Cheryl's was "Dolores", in reference to the protagonist and title character of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita. The American staff altered these names, as they considered them too uncommon. Certain items and doors in the "nowhere" dimension of the game were given names based on occult elements in order to symbolize magical traits of Dahlia. The names of these doors were taken from the names of the angels Ophiel, Hagith, Phaleg, and Bethor, who appear in a medieval book of black magic and are supposed to rule over planets. This motif of giving names that suggest planets was used to signify that "a deeper part of the realm of Alessa's mind is being entered", according to Owaku. In addition to the music, he was in charge of tasks such as sound effect creation and audio mastering. To differentiate Silent Hill from other games as much as possible, and to give it a cold and rusty feel, Yamaoka opted for industrial music. When she arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to record the translated Spanish lyrics with Argentine singer Vanesa Quiroz, Muranaka realized that the syllables did not match the melodic line any more, and she had to recompose it in five minutes. The 17th track on the album is the ballad "I Want Love" performed by Romina Arena.

Silent Hill was released for the PlayStation in 1999, from February to July in North America, Japan, and Europe. It was included in the Japanese Silent Hill Complete Set in 2006. Silent Hill became available for download from the European PlayStation Network store of the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Portable on March 19, 2009. Two days later, the game was removed due to "unforeseen circumstances". On September 10, Silent Hill was released on the North American PlayStation Network. It was re released on the European PlayStation Network on October 26, 2011.