The Sam Barlow Hour
October 15, 2009

Hey everyone! We previously heard a bit from Director Mark Simmons, but there’s another person at Climax who has a big impact on the game (well, I mean there’s a lot of people there, and they all impact the game… but I had to think of an intro so cut me some slack). I’m talking of course about Lead Designer Sam Barlow! Today we’re going to hear some of his thoughts on inspiration for Silent Hill (while I pat us on the back for our first successful week of Tues/Thurs updates!)

Hi, I’m Sam Barlow and I’m the designer and writer of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. I head up the design team on the project and get my hand’s dirty with a lot of the fun parts of the game — the original concept, story and overall player experience.

If you’re reading this, I imagine you’ve already digested a couple of trailers and read a few interviews — you may even have been lucky enough to get hands on with the game at E3 or GamesCon. So I’ll resist giving it the hard sell — suffice it to say, Shattered Memories is a fascinating title — a genuine ‘experience’, with all sorts of interesting new ideas and spins on the conventions of the horror videogame. If you like stories, if you like mood pieces, if you just like the idea of losing yourself in a mysterious town on your Wii (and PSP or PS2)… this game is for you.

So instead of the sales pitch, I’ll get with the “behind the scenes” vibe of these blogs and take you on a brief, whistle-stop tour through some of the influences that led us down the windy path of re-imagining Silent Hill. Often one of the most enjoyable parts of any game development are the very early stages when you’re free to imagine and the sky’s the limit. This phase of the project tends to see my Amazon account start to glow white hot, plumes of black smoke filling the air. Familiar brown cardboard parcels start to pile up and my bedside table is lost under a towering pile of ‘research’. It’s an excuse to re-read favourite books, to get hold of the enhanced DVD of a favourite movie, explore new avenues of knowledge — pulling in influences left, right and center to try and get a handle on the (at this stage) broad brush strokes that we’ve defined for the title. These influences are often helpful to give team members an idea of the aspirations or techniques we’re gunning for in a new game. Anyway, here’s three pieces from the big stack of stuff that we pulled together as jumping-off points for Silent Hill: Shattered Memories:

Hitchcock’s Vertigo
I’m a huge Hitchcock fanboy and also a big fan of the writers Boileau & Narcejac whose book this movie is based on (they also penned the novel that became ‘Les Diaboliques’ — one of the original, and best horror thrillers — and a great book that is under-rated, but a favourite of mine: ‘Who was Clare Jallu?’) With Shattered Memories we wanted to create an experience about obsession and memory. A game with layers of meaning and imagery that would reward repeated play-throughs. Vertigo is a master class in these elements — one of the great portraits of obsession and one which escalates its character’s dilemma to fever pitch through Hitchcock’s use of suspense and his impeccable attention to detail and imagery (his ‘pure cinema’). The viewer is drawn deeper and deeper into the ‘trap’ which swallows Jimmy Stewart’s character whole, but not through pure empathy — Hitchcock often distances us from the protagonist and uses this distancing affect to heighten the suspense (there are points where you know more than Jimmy’s character and points where you will question his sanity and whether what he is seeing is real). This is something we took and ran with in Shattered Memories — in this game we want you to question your main character, we use techniques that create a kind of separation so you are constantly evaluating the events of the game and what is real. At the same time you’re rushing headlong with Harry deeper and deeper into the story.

Bunuel’s Belle de Jour
Bunuel is probably, for me, the great filmmaker of dream imagery. Other people’s dreams are, famously, very boring. But Bunuel’s movies couldn’t be further from this truth — they retain the excitement of dreams and the core Surrealist concept — of the “collision of metaphors”. Whereas many films treat dreams and hallucinations with cartoony visual shorthand (out of focus shots, wibbly cross-fades, all sorts of ‘arty’ visual filters), Bunuel films dreams like we experience them — as slices of reality whose arrangement is counter to logic but always catches us by surprise — we don’t know were dreaming till we’re halfway down the rabbit hole. Belle de Jour is one of his most accessible and mysterious movies, but this style is also prevalent in some of his other masterpieces such as The Exterminating Angel, That Obscure Object of Desire and The Phantom of Liberty (the way the protagonist itself shifts in this movie, counter to every rule in the book, is something that would make an amazing game — food for thought for future projects!)

J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition
Another classic of “obsession” — Ballard’s non-linear masterpiece. Something of an obsession of mine is the concept of a “palimpsest story”. A palimpsest is an ancient text where many (often 100s) of different texts have been written on the same writing material over time. Modern techniques allow us to view these texts and attempt to find meaning in the densely over-written passages. This is how I refer to a story that is made of many smaller pieces, whose connections are not clearly defined — a work in which the reader/viewer/player assembles their own picture of what is going slowly by merging these smaller pieces of the puzzle. The pieces might contradict, or contrast, or seem unconnected. Initially they obscure each other and resist a global interpretation. But over time a coherent picture emerges. This is how a reader approaches Ballard’s book — free to dip in and out where they please, reading the small, exquisitely conceived nuggets of Ballard’s story of a doctor whose mind and self-awareness have fragmented and shattered to kaleidoscopic effect. Our ability to order and make sense of confusion and what appears to be noise engages us with these texts in a very deep level. The player-led interface of a videogame lends itself brilliantly to this story-telling style and in Silent Hill we litter the world with layers of the palimpsest, fragments and details, small snippets of story and plot told through text messages, voicemail fragments, environmental details and our the collectible “mementos”. The order and number of those collected by a given player is variable and the extent to which players scrutinize them will also be down to individual play-styles. It’s organic and player-driven. The sensation of an emerging picture, a sense of understanding that comes into focus and the an order we slowly impose on the noise of a deep and layered world is often revelatory and exciting. It’s techniques like these, ideally suited to videogames, that can create a memorable and compelling experience just like Ballard’s classic.

Well that’s enough for now. Thanks for reading and I sincerely hope that you’ll love Shattered Memories when you get your hands on it and come away feeling that we’ve managed to capture at least some of the magic we found in our influences — giving it a new form and a new life in this new Silent Hill videogame!

–Sam

source: SHSM Blog – Welcome to the Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Blog | 10/15/2009