‘We proved people wrong:’ After Silent Hill 2, Bloober Team’s survival horror developers are no longer ‘feeling like underdogs all the time’
“Give us a chance,” horror studio Bloober Team asked Silent Hill fans last summer.
Before Silent Hill 2’s remake racked up critical acclaim on release, the developers at Bloober Team spent two years working under the Sauron-like eye of a fandom that had weathered far too many disappointments, and a horror audience that saw Bloober’s past horror games as insufficient evidence it could nail a remake of one of the genre’s all-time greats.
But the studio pulled it off, raising its star in the eyes of horror fans everywhere overnight and earning it a pat on the back from Konami in the form of a green light for a Silent Hill 1 remake. Now Bloober’s next game, the more Resident Evil-leaning Cronos: The New Dawn, is coming from ‘the studio that made the Silent Hill 2 remake’ (complimentary) not ‘the studio that made that Silent Hill 2 remake’ (derogatory).
That distinction has been important for the morale of the developers at the Polish studio, Cronos game director Jacek Zięba told PC Gamer in a recent interview.
“We are starting to stop feeling like underdogs all the time after Silent Hill,” he said. “The Silent Hill era wasn’t so easy in the eyes of the public. There were a lot of voices: ‘Oh no, Bloober is doing this. They will destroy that.’ It was very tough for the whole company to stick to our guns and put all our heart into that thing, even if most people don’t want it. We proved people wrong, so that’s nice.’
Zięba said that Bloober Team is in a “different position” after Silent Hill 2’s success, with players more interested in what it’s doing. For my part, I’m glad to see the studio returning to its favorite setting with Cronos: The New Dawn, the studio’s home city of Kraków—though with a blend of sci-fi disaster and ’80s Soviet aesthetics.
There’s still pressure for Cronos to do well, especially after Silent Hill 2’s success. But the studio isn’t facing the skepticism it was before.
“We’re in a different moment,” Zięba said. “I think we’re riding the wave of people being intrigued, and we need to deliver. We know we need to deliver. We put our hearts into all our games, and we do whatever we can to make it the best.”
Cronos’s lead writer Grzegorz Like chimed in that the team still wants to improve after Silent Hill 2.
“Every time you publish a game, you learn, and then you change, you evolve. You try to be better. I swear to god, we want to be better—even after Silent Hill,” he said. “People were like ‘this is perfection!’ This is not perfection.”
“Or maybe it is,” countered Zięba. “We also like to say that with Silent Hill and Cronos, it’s like two pizzas with different toppings. Even if we created one perfect one, maybe now we can show you a different one.”
Cronos: The New Dawn is out later this year.
