A group of Silent Hill 2 fans have taken to fixing a busted PC port of the acclaimed second game in the series, and the end result is massively impressive. Originally released in 2002, a time when porting games to PC often produced versions inferior to their console counterparts, Silent Hill 2 on PC is full of problems that make the game less than an ideal experience. The game doesn’t support the widescreen resolutions of many player’s monitors today, the game’s signature fog isn’t as thick as it should be, and some of the UI sticks around during cutscenes to break the immersion. They’re all problems that players put up with back in the early 2000s, but PC ports have come a long way since then.
This isn’t the first time that Silent Hill 2 hit more modern machines, but the official attempt by Konami made fans shriek in terror for all the wrong reasons. The Silent Hill HD Collection had the developers at Hijinx Studios working from unfinished source code to bring the game (and Silent Hill 3) to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The end result was a game that revealed purposefully hidden details in the fog of the titular town, among other problems. All that and a seemingly needless rerecording of the game’s voice acting was enough to make fans forget that this version of the game ever existed.
While it would be impossible to fix the Silent Hill HD Collection‘s issues, the PC port of Silent Hill 2 has the benefit of existing on a platform with generous mod support. GameSpot caught up with a group of players who have released Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition, an ongoing collection of mods that removes port-specific issues, updates the game for modern hardware, and even fixes bugs that were in place in the original release.
The Enhanced Edition work began in 2016 and has grown since then into a sprawling retooling of this horror classic. In fact, the patch for the game is now several times larger than the original port, which is only a few gigabytes in size. Over the years, the new version of the game has added controller support, fixes for bugs caused by new video card drivers, and reimplementation of visual tricks only seen in the definitive PlayStation 2 version. Players who want to experience this new version of Silent Hill 2 will have to get creative, as there’s no legal way to obtain the PC version of the game as of now.
The PC gaming community is an invaluable resource when it comes to preserving classics like Silent Hill 2 from the slow march of history. Publishers sometimes show little interest in re-releasing or preserving their legacy titles, likely due to a perception that keeping old games in the public eye would take attention away from the all-important tentpoles of tomorrow. However, just like the re-releases of classic films on Blu-Ray whenever a reboot hits theaters, having older games available would only provide an important historical context and serve to keep fandoms alive. If there are no fans, there isn’t money to be made, so publishers who engage in this stifling of history purposefully or not are only shooting themselves in the foot.
