10 Video Game Origins You Never Knew

You'd certainly be forgiven for assuming that the Silent Hill franchise had little grounding in reality, what with its alternate dimensions and array of grotesque, otherworldly beasts.

While it's often been claimed that the original 1999 Silent Hill game based itself on the real ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania - a mining town which has had a coal mine fire burning underground for almost 60 years - this has since been disputed by the series' art director, Masahiro Ito.

However, the 2006 Silent Hill movie did introduce this link, with screenwriter Roger Avary making Silent Hill a similarly deserted mining town with an unstoppable underground fire.

But things got more interesting when, from 2008's Silent Hill: Homecoming onward, the video game series began to include elements such as raining ash, implying it had effectively co-opted the movie's origin story for the town.

Centralia may not have been the original influence behind Silent Hill's design, but it is a locale now inextricably linked to the franchise as a whole, both in film and video games.