Dementium: The Ward was Originally Pitched as a Silent Hill Game

Indie developer Renegade Kid is always giving cool insights into the development of its games, and the newest fun fact dropped by RK’s Jools Watsham is quite interesting. The 2007 DS horror game Dementium: The Ward was originally pitched to Konami as a DS version of Silent Hill.

Watsham even detailed this meeting to IGN, saying “Our goal was always to release The Ward as an original game, but we were also open to the idea of turning it into a licensed horror game and approached Konami to see if they wanted to work together to mold it into a Silent Hill game for the Nintendo DS.” Konami declined to license one of their biggest properties to Renegade Kid, a small and independent developer.

Renegade Kid tried once more to make a Silent Hill game years down the road with the Dementium II engine, but Konami declined again. Watsham shared some images of what a Silent Hill DS could have looked like with IGN. It seems Konami was just not interested in bringing Silent Hill to DS at the time. Interestingly enough, the WayForward PS Vita game Silent Hill: Book of Memories started development as a DS game in 2006. So Konami was once playing around with the idea of Silent Hill on DS. (Check out early footage of WayForward’s DS Silent Hill)

Perhaps it was for the best that Renegade Kid created an original IP rather than working on Konami’s property. Konami has been having a rough year, with all kinds of trouble brewing. Hideo Kojima is planning to leave the company, the new installment of the flagship horror series called Silent Hills was canceled this week, and the company plans to delist itself from the New York Stock Exchange.

Meanwhile, the Dementium franchise is alive and well, with enhanced ports of both games planned for release on the Nintendo 3DS eShop later this year. I dug up Nintendojo’s original review of Dementium: The Ward from our archives, if you want to see what we thought of the first game.

Source: IGN