Is Microsoft Set to Rescue Silent Hills?

Could it be? It is true? Will the greatest game never made really be resurrected? According to the Rooster Teeth YouTube channel: “We can report through an anonymous source that Microsoft is currently in talks to purchase Silent Hills from Konami, and have project as an Xbox One exclusive,” in a deal supposedly worth billions of dollars.

The recently cancelled Silent Hills – co-directed by horror auteur Guillermo del Toro and Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima, and starring The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus – is one of the many causalities of Konami’s ‘scorched Earth’ restructuring, with the company refocusing its resources on mobile gaming and gambling, but is probably the most lamented. The game’s demo, P.T., hailed as a masterpiece in of itself, was downloaded over a million time from the PlayStation Store, before being acrimoniously pulled last month. The source claims that Konami pulled P.T. from the PlayStation Store “as a show of good faith to Microsoft.”

The unsubstantiated rumour of Silent Hills’ imminent rescue courtesy of Microsoft sounds outlandish, but Lawrence Sonntag of Rooster Teeth’s The Know assures viewers that its anonymous source is trustworthy, saying, “The source is in the industry – very well placed – and has leak information to us in the past that has become true. Specifically, we learned from the source in July 2013 […] that Microsoft would eventually release an Xbox One without a Kinect, and at the time this is when Microsoft was saying, ‘we will never, ever, ever do it’.” The Know’s source reported that the change would occur Summer 2014 – Xbox One without Kinect then shipped on 9th June, 2014.

The Know added, “Our source told us that Microsoft is hungry for exclusives, and they are in serious talks with Konami to buy the Silent Hill property and convert it into an Xbox One exclusive. On top of that, Microsoft is hoping to close this deal by E3 so they can trot it out as a huge get,” so we shouldn’t have to wait too long until the report is confirmed to be true.

Finally, the leaker says that “Silent Hills is said to be about 80% done, and if all that is true the game could come out as early as March of next year.”

Billions of dollars for an ailing franchise? “80% done” when Reedus said during a reddit AMA in December 2014 that “we haven’t shot the heavy [motion capture] stuff yet”? I don’t buy a word of it. But I desperately want to.

Image courtesy of Forbes.