Summary
Some eagle-eyed fans have discovered an incredibly obscure reference to Hideo Kojima’s canceledSilent Hillsgame and itsP.T.demo in the reveal trailer forOD, Kojima Productions' latest title. The trailer itself premiered at The Game Awards 2023, whereKojima and Jordan Peele officially announced the Xbox-exclusive horror gamewith a star-studded cast.
Immediately after the 89-second video was shown at TGA, Kojima appeared on stage by walking out of an exact replica of a wooden door fromP.T.However, it turns out thatthisODreveal Easter eggwasn’t the only reference toSilent Hillsthat was snuck into the presentation.
OD Trailer Literally Spells Out One Silent Hill Easter Egg
As several fans later realized, inspectingKojima Productions' latest trailer frame-by-frame reveals five light-gray letters that briefly appear in the mouth of Udo Kier’s character, starting from around the 40-second mark. The letters spell out the word “Atami,” which is the name of a seaside Japanese city located in the Shizuoka Prefecture to the southwest of Tokyo. In kanji, the name of this prefecture is written as “静岡.” A literal translation of those characters would equate to “quiet” or “silent” for 静 and “hill” for 岡, as recently noted by Reddit user GlazicBlr.
That may not be the only connection between this carefully hidden word and theSilent Hillfranchise; according to a 2013 entry from a Niconico Pedia page detailing the original game, the setting of the 1999Silent Hillwas partially inspired by Atami. However, that claim isn’t attributed to any particular source, so its veracity remains dubious because Niconico Pedia is a Wikipedia-like crowdsourced platform that anyone can contribute to.
Time will tellwhether theseP.T.references in theODreveal presentation are a big deal.Silent Hillis still a Konami IP, making it extremely unlikely to officially be tied intoOD, not least because of the infamous 2015 fallout between Konami and Kojima that made the latter leave his employer of 30 years and found Kojima Productions. But given Kojima’s long-stated desire to make a AAA horror game, there is a plausible chance that some of the ideas he had forSilent Hillsand experimented with inP.T.might end up being incorporated intoOD.
On the other hand, Kojima never had any issues coming up with completely original concepts, so expectingODto simply be theSilent Hillsgame that never was—sans the established IP—would be a disservice to his creative track record. Not to mention that the man himself already vowed that his Xbox-exclusive game will be something that will attempt to transcend the gaming medium, which should already help it differentiate itself from his long-canceled horror project. Between that andKojima’s perpetual habit of trollingP.T.fans, it’s simply too early to tell whether these elaborateODEaster eggs are hinting toward anything substantial.
