Silent Hill series producer Tomm Hulett has finally been able to explain why Silent Hill: HD Collection was such a disappointing mess. It turns out that what we got wasn’t ported from the final versions of each game. Konami, true to its form as an incompetent barnyward of jokers, lost the source code.
“We got all the source code that Konami had on file — which it turns out wasn’t the final release version of the games,” he told 1UP. “So during debug we didn’t just have to deal with the expected ‘porting’ bugs, but also had to squash some bugs that the original team obviously removed prior to release, but we’d never seen before.
“A lot of assets such as textures and sound had to be taken out of the compiled game, and that brings with it a host of unique issues, especially taken on top of the tricky coding workarounds at play in the original games. We certainly had our hands full. I think at one point Heather was blue.”
With everything else Konami has done, this makes total sense. It makes sense that it would lose code, and still have the nerve to release an inferior HD Collection for two of its most prestigious titles. Just another day in the life for the Inspector Clouseau of videogame publishers.
The Problem with Preservation [1UP, via VG247]
