20 Mind-Blowing Facts You Didn't Know About Silent Hill

8. Most Characters Are Based On Real Actors

Takayoshi Sato has an insane work ethic, and his skills were what mostly brought the original Silent Hill to life, but he ran into some issues when making the character models for the first game. Realising that the America setting and cast necessitated he design the characters to look...well, American, he struggled because his all-Japanese colleagues couldn't provide real-life references to work from. Instead he looked to American films, in much the same way the rest of the development team did. That started a practice of a lot of the principal characters in the Silent Hill games having their likeness loosely based on actors; it never gets to a Last Of Us Ellen Page-style extreme, but not far off. Besides nabbing Eddie Murphy's name for the aforementioned puking Silent Hill 2 character, Cheryl Mason being named after Twin Peaks actress Sheryl Lee, in the third game Vincent was named after Vincent Gallo but had his appearance taken from Ethan Hawke; antagonist Claudia Wolf, meanwhile, was said to be inspired by Julianne Moore.