The Silent Hill series has complex lore and an insanely detailed backstory, and this is a big part of why the franchise attracts such a passionate and devoted fanbase. However, that commitment can sometimes boil over into more questionable activity, and that's something that former series producer Tomm Hulett has discussed recently on Simon Parkin's excellent My Perfect Console podcast.
Hulett had a role on Silent Hill: Origins as an associate producer and was a producer credit on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Silent Hill: Book of Memories and Silent Hill: Downpour. While he says it was an "exciting" time to have joined Konami, "the weight of what was going on and the negative response hit me during Downpour's development" when an internet documentary went live that "made a lot of false claims and a lot of assumptions and that came out while I was in the Czech Republic with the developer... and that was kind of a depressing trip from then on."
Hulett refuses to call out the creator of the video, but reveals that it was intended to undermine the Western-made Silent Hill games, which some fans still don't see as 'true' successors to the Japan-made originals. Both Hulett and Sam Barlow (director of both Origins and Shattered Memories) are mentioned by name, which resulted in horrific online harassment.
"That video made enough waves that you had smaller YouTubers jumping on it," he recalls. "So a lot of them would do impressions of me, or make me a character like, 'this is this is how Tomm Hullet wakes up in the morning', and some guy would be doing a bunch of dumb stuff, and then he'd have Silent Hill on the toilet paper roll or whatever, claiming that I wanted to destroy the series... [that] I was making bad decisions on purpose."
It got worse than that, remarkably. "Konami also would get death threats," Hulett continues. "My wife was the head of customer support. If people play Shattered Memories and you dial Konami's customer support number, you're actually hearing my wife read a message that we recorded. So you're getting the authentic customer support experience. But she was like the brunt of getting all these death threats. I wouldn't see them, but my wife would."
The backlash got so bad that it ruined what should have been a proud moment for Hulett; he was invited to the premiere of the 2012 movie adaptation Silent Hill: Revelation but was unable to share the red carpet with his wife. "They were going to let me walk the red carpet, and she said, 'I'm not taking any pictures. I don't want any of these people to know what I look like.' So I got to walk a red carpet for the only time in my life [but] my wife couldn't join me because she was afraid of the backlash of the fans. So that's a little depressing."
Another episode involved Silent Hill HD Collection, which Hulett himself admits "was not a product that turned out great." During the development of the collection, his wife underwent surgery, so he took time off to support her recovery, but not before leaving Konami with a list of things that needed to be addressed before the product shipped. For whatever reason, his suggestions were ignored, and the pack launched in a pretty bad state.
"There was a huge backlash," Hulett says. "I said, hey, what can we do to get ahead of this, it seems really bad, so they sent me my copy of the game, the retail copy, and I got permission from my wife to play it while she was finishing her recovery. I was gonna make a list of what we could patch; it was actually like the same list of things that I'd already made before I left. I don't know why they didn't get fixed. I don't know if it was a conscious decision. I don't know if my original list blew up somewhere, but it was like, oh my gosh, I know how bad this is, because I already made this list. [This was] in my vacation time. My wife was again taking it on the chin a little bit for the sake of the series. That was probably the worst moment."
Again, Hulett became the focal point for unrest about the state of the HD Collection. "I was on NeoGAF trying to engage as much as I could professionally. I'm trying to be upfront. I know we can't be transparent, but I'm trying to be as transparent as we can be, and it just wasn't ever met with understanding or slack. It was just like, 'this guy sucks, it's all his fault, why is he doing this on purpose, let's figure it out.' So that was that."
Hulett, who has also worked on titles such as Contra 4, Contra: Operation Galuga, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and The Mummy Demastered, doesn't think the higher-ups at companies like Konami understand how blowback of this kind can impact developers.
"I just don't think they got the gravity of it... I've always wanted to be upfront with representing my games... marketing people [are] responsible for a bunch of games. So Konami's releasing like Metal Gear, Silent Hills, Castlevanias, all these things, and so the guy that represents all those things is only gonna know so much about Silent Hill. And it's a series with so much lore... Konami let me be up in front and do events and things, which was great. But no one that really understood like, wait, if we put Tomm out in front and these people are hating on the series, this is actually a person getting the brunt of this. He's then the figurehead."