Konami and Team Silent’s brilliant PS1 horror game Silent Hill has hit 100% decompilation via an amazing ongoing fan project.
While decompilations and recompilations have become a sketchy subjects due to poor-quality AI-coded projects flooding social media, the Silent Hill decompilation project proudly features “no AI generated code”. The project, which has been in the works for over two years, has seen a team of 45 contributors recreate the original’s codebase.
In an update on GitHub, the team confirmed that the original game’s code has now been faithfully recreated to the same technical base that Team Silent created for the PS1. While there is still work to be done, this decompilation will pave the way for fan-made ports, mods, and more of Konami’s iconic horror game.
As fans of the original game know, the reason the game has never been properly re-released is due to the fact that Konami and Team Silent lost the game’s original source code. In the late 90s, many studios wiped the source code for games to make space to work on new titles, and Konami’s horror game is just one victim of this outdated practice.
In a message to fans, team member IWILLCRaFT explained that the project still has “a bunch of other things to do”, including documentation and cleanup that will help others understand the game’s code. Additionally, they explained that the team struggled with a “demon function” that Konami created to handle the game’s vibration feature, which was a new technology at the time.
While AI decompilations have become prominent over the last couple of months, the team member explained that the team did not use AI to create the decompilation. While AI was used, they explain that the technology was used for “data migration”, adding that using AI-generated code “would be against our policy of clean code which indicated that everything should be easy to comprehend”.
With that said, there is an AI-based “recompilation” out in the wild, which the team member explained doesn’t represent the team working on the game’s true decompilation project. That port is derived from an unfinished version of the decompilation project with the team member noting that “the person behind it became aggressive toward us”.
That version of Silent Hill, which has spread across social media, was met with praise from fans simply due to its release. However, as with many AI-led ports and fan projects, fans who played the port for longer than the game’s intro noticed missing models, extreme bugs, and other issues that shouldn’t be present in a human-led port based off the finished decompilation project.
The team member explained that the decompilation project is only based on the game’s US port, and the team is looking “to uncover what the Jap[anese] and Eur[opean] versions differ” in terms of assets and code. This would mean that fans will be able to learn more about how Silent Hill functions in every possible way, archiving everything about the horror game.
Alongside this decompilation project, the original Silent Hill is set to return in a full-fledged remake by Bloober Team, the studio behind the second game’s great remake. The remake, which could be scheduled for 2027 judging by the series’ annual release structure, is set to expand the original game for modern platforms.
