Do y’all remember that interactive Silent Hill show that premiered last November and was real bad? Did you know it was still going for several months before its final chapter premiered on May 2? I had completely wiped Silent Hill: Ascension from my memory, but now that I’ve learned that there was apparently a contest to have custom characters appear in the game as NPCs, I can’t stop thinking about it. That’s because fans are speculating that viewers managed to get characters modeled after Hideo Kojima, who is famously estranged from Silent Hill developer Konami, into Ascension.
I first took notice of this when a fan of streamer Super Eyepatch Wolf noted the phenomenon on X (formerly Twitter). I had to see what was up because the idea that someone may have gotten one character that looked like Kojima into the show was hilarious, but that it could have been several seemed almost impossible. Luckily, he’s uploaded VODs for his stream on YouTube. At the 3:20 mark, Super Eyepatch Wolf stops the game completely as a long-haired man who looks a lot like Kojima shows up in a scene.
Some other appearances of “Kojima-likes” don’t quite look like the Death Stranding developer. The ones Super Eyepatch Wolf questions at the 51:49 and 1:01:13 marks only really resemble him in that they also wear glasses, but that one at 3:20 looks much closer, just with some real luxurious locks to go with it. Part of me wonders if this is just Silent Hill: Ascension’s character creation tools being very limited, so characters end up sharing a handful of traits that happen to overlap with Kojima’s appearance, such as the glasses and beard. But the thought that even one person specifically wanted to put the developer in his past employer’s game as an act of protest is an amusing one.
Kojima’s falling out with Konami was heavily publicized and speculated on back in 2015. It got so ugly that Geoff Keighley, who rarely talks about anything unsavory going on in the industry, called out Konami during The Game Awards that year. While Kojima is most often associated with Metal Gear, one of his last projects under Konami was Silent Hills, a canceled game co-directed with Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. The two would later go on to collaborate on Death Stranding, with del Toro being the model for the character Deadman.
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