Konami let the silenthill.com domain expire and some joker bought it

(Image credit: Konami)

The fact that publisher Konami doesn't really care about Silent Hill or its legacy is basically a meme at this point, the series seemingly relegated to perpetual limbo in the form of DLC for unrelated multiplayer games. The publisher has now let its ownership of the silenthill.com domain name lapse long enough for someone else to buy it, an example of how little Konami cares so pointed that if a satirist came up with it you'd think it was a little on-the-nose.

This isn't even the first time Konami forgot to renew its registration. In December of 2019, silenthill.com was spotted on sale for $9,835, but nobody was quick enough to grab it before Konami. This time, some cashed-up troll got in there and now if you type silent hill dot com into your web browser of choice, you'll end up on a page showing a tweet from Masahiro Ito that says, "I wish I hadn't designed fxxkin Pyramid Head."

That's a real tweet, by the way. Ito was art director on Silent Hill 2, creating the monster that would go on to be too iconic for its own good, seeing so much reuse that Ito said, in a now-deleted tweet, "To use PH in many titles makes PH cheaper."

As a side note, part of the inspiration for Pyramid Head's distinctive helmet came from a German WWII tank called the King Tiger—Ito's into tanks and military history as well as horror, and would eventually combine his two loves again by working on a Halloween event for World of Tanks.

While Konami blithely lets Silent Hill drift off into the fog, the first game's director and writer Keiichiro Toyama is working on a wild-looking horror game called Slitterhead, which will also feature music from Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka. Getting your hopes up for that seems like a safer bet than expecting Konami to do anything worthwhile with Silent Hill.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.