It might not have been the first game I bought for the PS2 — that would be Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore because I wanted to beat the holy living crap out of my friends without worrying about restraining orders — but it was the reason I bought a PS2 in the first place. What we all discovered that quiet, unassuming day in 2001, was a game that would crawl into the narrowest crevices and darkest cobwebbed corners of our psyche and just fester, like a gangrenous wound left untreated. Everyone who plays it has his or her own story about how this game affected them. This month’s issue of Game Informer magazine contains the editors’ list of the top 50 best horror games of all time and Silent Hill 2 sits comfortably in the #2 position, beaten out only by the undeniable legacy of the original PS1 Resident Evil (which, at 18 years of age, is now legally able to vote) coupled with its 2004 remake on the GameCube. That should tell you everything you need to know, except for my story. That comes after the jump.

More like “New Nightmare”.

So Silent Hill 2 celebrates its 13th birthday today in the USA, an announcement that makes me feel simultaneously happy, unnerved, and old.

Happy.

I received Silent Hill 2 for my birthday, less than a month after its release, in 2001. Anybody who thinks having an October birthday sucks, just remember: I get all the good stuff right before Halloween. As an avid fan of the first game, I couldn’t wait to experience what Konami had in store for me. Add to the elation that I’d been married for just over two months at this point: I had a new house, a new wife, a (relatively) new game console, and now held in my hand the reason I’d wanted that new console to begin with. What could be better? Silent Hill 2 arrived in my house at what can only be described as an absolute peak of happiness in my life. And it’s a damn good thing it did, because I’m not sure my psyche could have handled playing it if I had been down in the dumps.

Unnerved.

Silent Hill 2 changed everything, literally everything, about gaming, and I’m not using that word ironically. The scare-meisters of Konami’s Team Silent performed a ruthless vivisection on game development itself. They poked and prodded and lanced and sliced and grafted the concept of ‘design’ until it resembled one of their own grotesque creations, stripped away everything unnecessary, until they had a bare base of life to work with. From this blueprint they built the most psychologically twisted work of art conceived outside of German cinema.

The Yelp reviews for this bathroom could be a whole new article.

Official US PlayStation Magazine, on the cover of their October, 2001 issue, declared Silent Hill 2 “the scariest game ever made.” It was not a question, it was not hyperbole, it was simply the most terrifying thing these editors had ever seen. Period. Paragraph.

Likewise, it was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen on a game screen. James Sunderland’s journey of remembrance, and the characters’ desperate searches for answers to questions that should never be asked, tripped every breaker in my brain’s fusebox of ‘Wrong’. It did everything a game like it should, but it didn’t drag me anywhere I didn’t ask to go in the first place.

“Keep out”? Probably doesn’t apply to me.

I remember reading an article about the game’s development where someone (I believe it was Akira Yamaoka, but I’m not 100% sure) described the detail the team went into when it came to sound design. Where most games would have one or two different samples of footfalls for the protagonist, Team Silent recorded hundreds of different sounds for James’s footsteps. Every surface in the game (carpet, wood, stone, asphalt, metal, grass, etc…) had dozens of samples the game would randomize and choose from each and every time you took a step, and those samples changed based on whether you were walking or running. It’s done so flawlessly your brain doesn’t even recognize it, because the result mimics real life. And that’s just one small, minor detail. Silent Hill 2 is the sum of hundreds of these little details, all working hand-in-hand, to ensure the game is not played, but experienced.

Finally, Silent Hill 2 also earns its place as one of the only video games I have ever wanted to continue playing, but had to stop. My work schedule at the time was comprised of mostly nights, so I was home after dark, sitting in my living room, playing the game on a 55″ widescreen television with a full surround sound system. There aren’t words to describe what something like this does to a person, you just have to experience it yourself. And some nights, it was only thirty minutes of play before I hit a save point and decided, “I just cannot mentally deal with this any longer.” I’ve played games since that mess with your head, but nothing, nothing, has ever taken root in my subconscious the way this thing did. Some games screw with your head for a few hours–Silent Hill 2′s been boning my braincase for over a decade.

Old.

Thirteen years.

That doesn’t seem like a long time in the grand scheme of things, especially when you’re younger. I was twenty-four when I first played Silent Hill 2, and I’m thirty-six as I write this today. In the intervening thirteen years, nearly everything in my life has changed. I live in a different house, in a different neighborhood. The game store where my wife bought my copy of Silent Hill 2 closed down four years ago. I’ve attended far, far too many funerals for friends and loved ones. I’ve buried more beloved companion animals than I care to think about.

Angela knows the feeling.

Things in Silent Hill 2 also feel old. Neglected. Worn out.

I look at things differently now that I’m in my late thirties than I did in my early twenties. I’ve had more brushes with death. More bouts of depression. Discovered truths about life I didn’t want to know. I’ve gone places, psychologically, I never wanted to go, and seen things there I never wanted to see. Each time, I’ve come back from the brink.

Each time I’ve felt like James, demanding answers to questions that should never be asked in the first place. Silent Hill 2 works so effectively because we’re all James. We’re all searching for our Mary. Sometimes we don’t even realize she’s gone until it’s too late.

James experiences one of several possible endings depending on how he faces the problems the game throws at him. The eventual outcomes all rest on his shoulders, whether that outcome is to accept what has happened and move on, to continue lying to himself in a semi-blissful ignorance which will result in a return trip sometime in the near future, or something much, much darker.

She always will be.

In life, it’s the same. We’re defined by the actions we take, our responses to the slings and arrows of outrageous (mis)fortune. We too have our choices to make. James, indirectly, served as council in my dark times. Because despite all the darkness surrounding him, he pushed on. He survived. He and those he encountered were all in a hell of their own making, trying desperately to atone, to understand, to find peace. Like our own, James’s future is multiple-choice. We’re all making the best of a bad situation. All that remains is to discover what our own ending will entail. And to hope when that ending comes it serves as a guide for others on the journey with us.

ProTip: The answer is NEVER in the back of the white, windowless van.

Happy birthday, Silent Hill 2. You make me feel joy, restlessness, and the pressing weight of years all at the same time. I’ll forever love, and hate, you for that. See you again this Halloween, old friend.

The invitation, as it arrives every year.

In closing, I present the two-page ad for Silent Hill 2 which first hinted at the future to come:

Damn it, they were right all along.

Michael Crisman

In 1979, Michael Crisman was mauled by a radioactive Gorgar pinball machine. After the wounds healed, doctors discovered his DNA had been re-coded. No longer fully human, Michael requires regular infusions of video games in order to continue living among you. If you see him, he can see you. Make no sudden moves, but instead bribe him with old issues of computer and video game magazines or a mint-in-box copy of Dragon Warrior IV.


If he made you laugh, drop a tip in his jar at http://paypal.me/modernzorker


(If he didn't make you laugh, donate to cure his compulsion to bang keyboards by sending an absurdly huge amount of money to his tip jar instead. That'll show him!)