The Silent Hill HD Collection should have been a love letter to fans, but instead, it turned out to be a technical disaster on many levels. Missing textures and crackling audio was just the tip of the iceberg. What went wrong?

Senior associate producer on the project, Tomm Hulett, has revealed to 1UP that Konami’s porting crew had to work off a beta build of the original source code. Apparently, Konami couldn’t find the source code belonging to the original gold master. Whoops.

“We got all the source code that Konami had on file — which it turns out wasn’t the final release version of the games,” noted Hulett.

He added, “So during debug we didn’t just have to deal with the expected ‘porting’ bugs, but also had to squash some bugs that the original team obviously removed prior to release, but we’d never seen before.”

On top of fixing bugs and other oddities in the pre-release code, the beta build wasn’t complete asset-wise, either. Hulett says Konami had to rip textures and sound straight from the original discs and import them in. While it’s an unfortunate situation, it’s still no excuse for the crippled state the HD Collection was released in, we think. Konami should have bit the bullet and issued a delay, or canned the project altogether.

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