Art director shares concept art from a cancelled 2013 Silent Hill project
... and still won't tell us what's under Pyramid Head's helmet.
Yes, it's been almost twenty years, and yes, we're still banging on about Silent Hill 2, but we're still learning new things about the seminal psychological horror game. This time, art director and creature designer, Masahiro Ito, has made a startling revelation about one of gaming's most terrifying antagonists: Pyramid Head's head is not the helmet itself.
In a recent Twitter exchange, the artist said that telling us what's beneath the helmet is akin to a magician giving away how magic tricks work, but he did confirm that in "no way" was PH's helmet an actual part of the creature.
"I'm often asked, 'What is the under the helmet of Pyramid Head?' But I'm not gonna answer that question. Example, as soon as you are given the trick of a magic, the magic will be nothing to you," he tweeted.
"However there is no way the helmet is the actual head of Pyramid Head."
Interestingly, this contradicts the Making Of Silent Hill 2 documentary that accompanied the original PAL versions of the game. In the documentary, the narrator explained how Ito's vision for PH changed from "a human in a mask" to a monster with a hidden face as "that way it was more disturbing and less human", leading many - including myself - to presume the helmet was actually part of PH's physicality. The triangle itself - with "right angles and acute edges" - "suggests the possibility of pain", as well as representing the monster's role in the game.
"I never said, 'the helmet/pyramid is his actual head'," Ito clarified. "'The pyramid instead of human's face' means just only 'a different look' on design."
In the same thread, fans asked Ito to comment on the back of PH's helmet, specifically the fleshy bulge at the monster's neck. While some presume the feature - seen most clearly in the helmet Konami brought to its Metal Gear Survive game - was added subsequently as PH's design changed over the years, it can be found in some original assets, too. Sadly, Ito had nothing further to add about it, so that's another mystery we've still yet to solve.
Oh, and if you think Ito's going to give anything away about the nine red square savepoint at the end of Silent Hill 2, he's keeping schtum on that, too.
"I'm often asked about the nine red squares at the end of SH2 too," Ito said. "I'm not gonna answer it because of the same reason."
Most astonishing of all? Ito then went on to show us a teeny, tiny, blurry image of artwork purportedly taken from a cancelled Silent Hill project from back in 2013 - a project we had not even known was in development. This means that just a few years before Kojima's Silent Hills - and several years after the franchise had been bouncing between Western development studios - the series had been back in the hands of at least one original Team Silent member...