20 Mind-Blowing Facts You Didn't Know About Silent Hill
11. Silent Hill 2 Was Based On Crime And Punishment
For the second game Takayoshi Sato, promoted to lead CGI director and properly credited as such, gave the basic premise for the storyline. The plot was later fleshed ou, but Sato got the core of the idea by venturing into a more literate place than most video game storylines: The basic storyline was based on Crime and Punishment. Which...actually makes a lot of sense. Whilst games have begun to look to classic works of literature for inspiration, it's tended to result in fairly loose adaptations of the original writing Dante's Inferno, anyone? but the themes and premise of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel are very evident in Silent Hill 2, and its protagonist James Sunderland. Slowly, the game reveals that James murdered his wife. Everything he goes through in the game is down to his guilty conscience as a result; that squares about right with Crime And Punishment's Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, who kills a pawnbroker to see if he can get away with it, convinced it's the morally right thing to do, only to fall into a spiral of death, destruction and despair.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
