Konami Kept Its Silent Hill Teams Apart, Townfall Director Says

Konami kept the teams working on its Silent Hill games apart on purpose, and did not show them what other studios were making. Jon McKellan, founder of Screen Burn and director of Silent Hill: Townfall, made the point during a panel at MCM London Comic Con. Video Games Chronicle reported his comments.

McKellan said his team found out about the other Silent Hill projects at the same time as everyone else, when they were announced. The arrangement came from Motoi Okamoto, Konami's producer for the series. Okamoto wanted the projects to avoid influencing one another, and did not want any of them to compromise too much.

Okamoto and his team reviewed the work on every Silent Hill game. If a team's work looked too close to another project, they would ask it to change course. They did not, however, say what the other work was.

McKellan said the Townfall team got to see Silent Hill f a couple of months before it came out. Konami asked his team only once to change a visual design, for a single enemy, because it was too close to another project.

Townfall is a self-contained psychological horror set in Scotland in 1996. It is the first full-length first-person game in the series, and it is available on PlayStation 5 and Steam. Okamoto has described its origin as a casual conversation between Konami's US team and Annapurna Interactive, which he later joined.

Konami released Patch 1.4.0 for Townfall on October 8, 2026, to improve systems and fix in-game issues, according to the patch notes.

The account offers a glimpse of how a long-running horror series gets built. Several studios work on related games, each with its own rules and its own deadlines. For players, the message is simple. Each Silent Hill game has been developed in its own space, with a producer checking that the games do not blur into one another.