Silent Hill 2 is a survival horror developed by Konami’s Team Silent and originally released for the Playstation 2 in 2001. Unfortunately we don’t know much about the development of the game, but in this page we’ll try to analyze some beta screens using all the informations at our disposal.
[Article written by Yota]
Beta Neely Street
For our series of interviews with people from various websites related to the unseen development of videogames, this time we got in contact with CRV, founder of the Game Developer Research Institute, an organization dedicated to researching gaming companies and their employee. With over 100 company entries and over 25 interviews, the GDRI archive is one of the best place to learn more about obscure studios and their works. In this unseen interview we talk about the GDRI site, contacts with developers and games preservation.
U64: Thanks for your time Smsgenny, would you like to introduce your site to our readers?
CRV: GDRI (Game Developer Research Institute) is a website/organization started back in 2006 that is dedicated to researching the companies and people involved in game development. We try to figure out who did what
U64: Why did you decide to open an archive about popular and obscure developers?
In this new chapter of our “Unseen Interviews”, a series of articles arranged to know better some of the other websites and lovely geeks that work to preserve unseen games, we have meet Phugolz, one of the minds that are behind X-Cult, a community based project to research, archive, and distribute hard to come by gaming information. In this interview we talked about how their site was born, the preservation of cancelled games, copyright issues, information sharing, proto collectors, gaming developers… and some questions to find out Phugolz’s taste in games and food. Do you want to know more about the X-Cult philosophy? Keep reading!
U64: Thanks for your time Phugolz! Would you like to introduce yourself and your site to our readers?
Phugolz: I am Phugolz / PACHUKA / RealaNightmaren from X-Cult, and half a dozen other cults.
U64: Why did you choose the “Sonic-Cult” / “X-Cult” name for the site?
This article was written a few years ago as a personal collection of notes. Thus it is incomplete, but maybe someday i will finish it. Also, forgive me for the shortness and the bad overall quality of this analysis.
[Original article in italian by monokoma, english translation by yota]
The Eternal Darkness project was born on the Nintendo 64. This version had already many of the features and locations of the future Gamecube version.
Peter Jacob in the Cathedral.
Article by yota
Resident Evil 5 was officially announced on June 2005, but it was shown for the first time to the public only two months later in a CG trailer. This video was essentially one of the concepts that the developers were working on since the release of Resident Evil 4: in what at time seemed to be the Middle East or Africa, we saw Chris exploring the alleys of a city and then being attacked by a group of enemies.
The graphics style and the general mood were already much similar to the released game, even if Chris looked somewhat younger and less bulky.It is interesting to note that producer of the game said, in an old interview, that originally the time of the day and the weather were supposed to have a major impact on the gameplay and affect the main characters abilities. Also, Resident Evil 5 was intended to be single player. Sheva was originally a NPC and a member of a local militia.She would have meet Chris only later in the game.
Anyway, Capcom created another trailer for Resident Evil 5 in 2007. The beginning of this video was not that different from the final game: Chris walked for a bit in the village and then suddenly all the natives seemed to vanish. There were, however, many important differences: Sheva and the dealer were nowhere to be found, Chris didn’t have his safari dress, cutscenes and dialogues were shorter, the location where we fought for the first time was completely removed, enemies had some attacks that can’t be found in the released game, such as the headbutt, and so on.
Even in the last year of the development Capcom was still moving things around. For example, the crash site of the helicopter was originally a fully playable section, not a series of QTE’s.
2004 Beta artworks
The merchant from Re 4 was supposed to return in Resident Evil 5. There were many shops around the town and you could even stole weapons and ammo.