How does Silent Hill: Ascension work?
Konami’s multigame revival of the Silent Hill franchise starts in 2023 with something brand-new: Silent Hill: Ascension, a streaming series that borrows from interactive fiction like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead, and community-driven play, à la Twitch Plays Pokémon. The result will be a computer-animated series that plays out over weeks and months, and is molded by player interaction. It will be canonical to the overall Silent Hill fiction, its creators say.
Polygon recently spoke to Jacob Navok, CEO of Genvid Entertainment, the company behind projects like The Walking Dead: Last Mile, a community-driven multiplayer Pac-Man game, and Silent Hill: Ascension, to learn more about the project. You can read an edited version of our conversation below.
Polygon: In appropriate Silent Hill fashion, there’s some mystery around the story and how people interact with it. So would you mind kind of giving me the basics on how this is going to play out for people?
Jacob Navok: Let me start by talking about what it is that we do, because that context is going to explain to you how the product works. We create interactive streaming shows, but they’re not [Black Mirror:] Bandersnatch. You’re not just individually playing it as a live stream — we’re actually using the same back end that Twitch operates on, and it’s streaming live from a game engine [that] is accepting all of the inputs from the audience [all] at the same time. You’re basically doing crowd-control decision making. Now, many of those decisions will be made in advance to the audience so that you don’t need to be there live at that moment. If you’re not available at the time at which the streams are on that day, you’ll be able to
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