8 Video Game Reboots That Failed TWICE

8. Silent Hill

The stark contrast between the confidence in the identity of Silent Hill during its late 90s and early 2000s heyday and everything that followed is something to behold. And despite ten years of entries that (at best) narrowly missed the mark, in 2014 things were looking up when the intriguing, shadowdropped demo P.T. was revealed to be the next Silent Hill game.

Helmed by industry legend Hideo Kojima, filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro and starring Norman Reedus; P.T.’s terrifying scares and mysterious demeanour set the internet ablaze. Of course, the only way that P.T. failed was in weathering the storm that was the breakdown in the relationship between Kojima Productions and Konami. The game was infamously cancelled and a decade later remains the biggest “what if” in gaming. 

With the bar set so high that Konami feared to go anywhere near it for eight years, the franchise would need to really leap to claw back some trust from the public. In October 2022, the company announced half a dozen new Silent Hill products including the next mainline entry, a new motion picture, a remake of the beloved Silent Hill 2…

But the first into the hands of the public - and the first since P.T.’s cancellation - was Silent Hill Ascension; an interactive drama series bloated with microtransactions and, of all things, a battlepass. This painfully wrought animated series was Silent Hill’s biggest point-and-laugh moment; an embarrassment of poor decision-making, least of which was the fact that new episodes would launch weekly for several months, long after people had mentally checked out. 

The last anyone ever really heard of the game was GenVid developers denying the usage of AI in their scriptwriting. Which, if true, just means you wrote a terrible script.