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I have a complicated relationship with the 1990s, an era remembered for its hazy pre-HD tech and early signs of broader connectivity without the mentally taxing standard of an always-online world. Lately, I’ve found the aesthetics of that era calling to me in the books I read, the shows I watch, and even in my social media feeds that regularly spit out “remember when?” reels that dredge up imagery of classrooms and malls that I never actually set foot in yet feel familiar. Instagram seems to think I’m simply nostalgic for this stuff, not understanding that I actually find it very eerie, snapshots of a childhood I can hardly recall for complicated reasons. And yet, I’m mesmerized by it.
Most recently, I felt that same pull in Screen Burn’s Silent Hill: Townfall.
Whereas games like Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2 were set roughly in their respective modern days and are today revered as dreary time capsules, Townfall resurrects similar vibes, in turn revealing which parts stick out most to the team performing that necromancy.
In a recent conversation with the studio’s co-founder and Townfall’s writer, Jon McKellan, he told me how Screen Burn sought to weaponize a particular type of nostalgia through the game’s handheld CRTV device, and why the 1990s remain the ideal backdrop for a horror story.
GameSpot: When Silent Hill: Townfall was first revealed, I wondered if it would be primarily a “gizmo” kind of game, like Stories Untold. Observation has a lot of physical interaction like that, too. What is it the team likes about that sort of thing in games?
Jon McKellan: I think with horror, having something recognisable and tangible just sort of grounds you in the world a little bit more. People might not ever have owned one, but we all can understand the sensation of holding a little screen in our hands that shows us scary things! I’ve always loved analogue video aesthetics, and it’s been a big part of my own art style through my career, so the idea of making an entire core mechanic/device around that aesthetic and experience felt like a great fit, especially when riffing off the static and radio features of previous Silent Hill titles.
Was there ever a version of Silent Hill: Townfall that was only going to be that (I’d actually expected something like Killer Frequency), or was it built from the ground up with first-person exploration and combat in mind, too?
We always had combat and exploration in mind. One of the earliest conversations I can recall on this project was Graeme and [I] discussing the idea of allowing the player to get up, walk around, explore, and deal with threats while solving those puzzles. It felt like the next big step in the experiences we at Screen Burn were building–to finally face a threat that was more visceral and immediate than we had ever had before in our previous titles.
How did the team land on the physical design and form factor of the device? It kind of reminds me of a haunted Game Boy.
I think we did actually refer to it as a “Creepy Game Boy” at one point in concept phases! We looked at a lot of different versions of pocket TVs from the ’80s and ’90s, and it was a case of trying to find the right shape, size, and style to feel weighty and old-fashioned in the characters’ hands, while giving us a big enough screen size on it to be useful in gameplay.
Some of the original Sony Watchman designs, for example, were very tall with small screens, and that kind of thing wouldn’t work on landscape compositions like a video game in first person, so we took all the best ideas, shapes, colour treatments, and so on from various different models and designed our own from scratch.
What came first: the ’90s setting or the CRTV gadget itself? How did one then inform the other?
It all really came together at the same time early on. We knew we wanted to do something new with the concept of the classic Silent Hill radio, as it was a very obvious “Screen Burn” thing for us to play with.
At the same time, when I was exploring concepts for the story, the ’90s setting fit for so many different reasons: the state of the world at that time, in places like St. Amelia especially, the rare availability of guns, and the fact that technology was starting to take off without actually being too useful at the time. We had email, internet, and pocket screens, but none were so useful they would get you out of a jam. There was no GPS on your phone, or even things like digitally tuning signals–it had to feel analogue, so it all just meshed together really well with the CRTV concept.
Was the CRTV nearly something very different, or perhaps even a traditional Silent Hill radio?
The very first sketches were in fact just a radio, yeah, and the idea was that you could simply tune into frequencies rather than passively receive static from enemies or the occasional voice. It felt very basic though and didn’t add much to gameplay, but tuning on the fly made sense. As soon as we latched on to the concept of it being a TV and having a screen that could be used for all sorts of game design uses, story development, and puzzle clues, the opportunities just immediately opened up for it, and there was no turning back.
How did you land on its specific functionality, and how it allows for tracking several enemies after scanning for them, but also really only one at a time in a “live” sense, albeit also through walls the way it does? It feels like it must’ve gone through some revisions before you landed on something you really liked.
There was a lot of experimentation for sure! We had tried lots of different versions of the mechanic surrounding enemies, from each ‘type’ of enemy on its own frequency, but multiple on the same one, to not showing their position visually and only showing you video of what type of enemy it was, and so on.
The great thing was that it was really fast to iterate and explore ideas, so we threw a lot of things at it to see what would work in different situations. How would it work with multiple enemies? How frustrating could it be to tune back and forth? What happens in areas with verticality? The last main addition was the quick tune, where once you had tuned into an enemy, you could quickly skip back and forth with the D-pad, making it much easier to track multiple enemies as you move around some more complex spaces.
Is there anything particularly Scottish about the CRTV’s design? When playing Silent Hill: Townfall, I felt like I learned about the country’s electricity system with that keycard-in-the-closet section.
There’s nothing in particular about the CRTV that is Scottish per se; it’s just something that fits that era particularly well. Not everyone would have one–especially not in a working-class island town!–but you maybe knew someone who did, or always wanted one if you were browsing an Argos catalogue in the ’90s. It’s just like a portable cassette player–has a connection with that time and place, I guess.
Do you or anyone on the team still collect things like this today? I’m 37, so I’m really into ’90s nostalgia right now, and things like Backrooms and Silent Hill: Townfall have warped my Instagram algorithm to show me a lot of that stuff, though I don’t own any of it myself.
Oh, we have a collection! Pretty much every bit of content you see on the CRTV in-game was actually played through a collection of different real pocket TVs or broadcast monitors. I run the signals from the game engine into these screens, and then generally distort the signal with static, magnets, and deliberately loose cables, and sort of “play” the interference and static like an instrument, varying its intensity or abruptness in time with dialogue or key moments.
I’d have a camera setup pointing at the screen, covered in sheets and filters to remove reflections, and film the “performance” of these scenes. This way, I’d pick up the real static and distortion, not faking it in software. It would also pick up different pixel grids for each type of screen–a 480p broadcast monitor versus a small LCD pocket TV would give you different pixel densities and layouts, which I would use depending on the scene or use case.
So over the years I’ve built up a collection of half-broken TVs and monitors, and still use them in production to this day. It’s one of the most fun parts of the job, and I could talk about it for hours!
I’m assuming you agree with me here, and please feel free to disagree if not, but what is it about the ’90s that feels so right for horror?
I think it’s back to that cusp of technology thing. You can use old PCs to read basic emails, or receive signals that break up convincingly in a cinematic way. The more you move into the 2000s and the digital era comes in, the more you lose some of that. When digital TV breaks up, it usually just stops, which is no fun visually!
The main thing I think, though, is that texture, static, and tangible form factor all ground the player. You can be in an unbelievable situation in a dreamscape, and still feel scared because the thing in your hand is relatable in some way. You can imagine feeling that in your hand subconsciously, so I think that just lowers the barrier to immersion a little. We talk a lot internally about “weaponising nostalgia”–taking that familiar thing that you connect with in an “Oh, I remember this!” way and then making it tell you horrible things!
Silent Hill: Townfall is out now on PC and PS5. In GameSpot’s Silent Hill: Townfall review, I spoke of how the game completes the series’ comeback with a third consecutive great entry.
“}]]
[[{“value”:”.
I have a complicated relationship with the 1990s, an era remembered for its hazy pre-HD tech and early signs of broader connectivity without the mentally taxing standard of an always-online world. Lately, I’ve found the aesthetics of that era calling to me in the books I read, the shows I watch, and even in my social media feeds that regularly spit out “remember when?” reels that dredge up imagery of classrooms and malls that I never actually set foot in yet feel familiar. Instagram seems to think I’m simply nostalgic for this stuff, not understanding that I actually find it very eerie, snapshots of a childhood I can hardly recall for complicated reasons. And yet, I’m mesmerized by it.
Most recently, I felt that same pull in Screen Burn’s Silent Hill: Townfall.
Whereas games like Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2 were set roughly in their respective modern days and are today revered as dreary time capsules, Townfall resurrects similar vibes, in turn revealing which parts stick out most to the team performing that necromancy.
In a recent conversation with the studio’s co-founder and Townfall’s writer, Jon McKellan, he told me how Screen Burn sought to weaponize a particular type of nostalgia through the game’s handheld CRTV device, and why the 1990s remain the ideal backdrop for a horror story.
GameSpot: When Silent Hill: Townfall was first revealed, I wondered if it would be primarily a “gizmo” kind of game, like Stories Untold. Observation has a lot of physical interaction like that, too. What is it the team likes about that sort of thing in games?
Jon McKellan: I think with horror, having something recognisable and tangible just sort of grounds you in the world a little bit more. People might not ever have owned one, but we all can understand the sensation of holding a little screen in our hands that shows us scary things! I’ve always loved analogue video aesthetics, and it’s been a big part of my own art style through my career, so the idea of making an entire core mechanic/device around that aesthetic and experience felt like a great fit, especially when riffing off the static and radio features of previous Silent Hill titles.
Was there ever a version of Silent Hill: Townfall that was only going to be that (I’d actually expected something like Killer Frequency), or was it built from the ground up with first-person exploration and combat in mind, too?
We always had combat and exploration in mind. One of the earliest conversations I can recall on this project was Graeme and [I] discussing the idea of allowing the player to get up, walk around, explore, and deal with threats while solving those puzzles. It felt like the next big step in the experiences we at Screen Burn were building–to finally face a threat that was more visceral and immediate than we had ever had before in our previous titles.
How did the team land on the physical design and form factor of the device? It kind of reminds me of a haunted Game Boy.
I think we did actually refer to it as a “Creepy Game Boy” at one point in concept phases! We looked at a lot of different versions of pocket TVs from the ’80s and ’90s, and it was a case of trying to find the right shape, size, and style to feel weighty and old-fashioned in the characters’ hands, while giving us a big enough screen size on it to be useful in gameplay.
Some of the original Sony Watchman designs, for example, were very tall with small screens, and that kind of thing wouldn’t work on landscape compositions like a video game in first person, so we took all the best ideas, shapes, colour treatments, and so on from various different models and designed our own from scratch.
What came first: the ’90s setting or the CRTV gadget itself? How did one then inform the other?
It all really came together at the same time early on. We knew we wanted to do something new with the concept of the classic Silent Hill radio, as it was a very obvious “Screen Burn” thing for us to play with.
At the same time, when I was exploring concepts for the story, the ’90s setting fit for so many different reasons: the state of the world at that time, in places like St. Amelia especially, the rare availability of guns, and the fact that technology was starting to take off without actually being too useful at the time. We had email, internet, and pocket screens, but none were so useful they would get you out of a jam. There was no GPS on your phone, or even things like digitally tuning signals–it had to feel analogue, so it all just meshed together really well with the CRTV concept.
Was the CRTV nearly something very different, or perhaps even a traditional Silent Hill radio?
The very first sketches were in fact just a radio, yeah, and the idea was that you could simply tune into frequencies rather than passively receive static from enemies or the occasional voice. It felt very basic though and didn’t add much to gameplay, but tuning on the fly made sense. As soon as we latched on to the concept of it being a TV and having a screen that could be used for all sorts of game design uses, story development, and puzzle clues, the opportunities just immediately opened up for it, and there was no turning back.
How did you land on its specific functionality, and how it allows for tracking several enemies after scanning for them, but also really only one at a time in a “live” sense, albeit also through walls the way it does? It feels like it must’ve gone through some revisions before you landed on something you really liked.
There was a lot of experimentation for sure! We had tried lots of different versions of the mechanic surrounding enemies, from each ‘type’ of enemy on its own frequency, but multiple on the same one, to not showing their position visually and only showing you video of what type of enemy it was, and so on.
The great thing was that it was really fast to iterate and explore ideas, so we threw a lot of things at it to see what would work in different situations. How would it work with multiple enemies? How frustrating could it be to tune back and forth? What happens in areas with verticality? The last main addition was the quick tune, where once you had tuned into an enemy, you could quickly skip back and forth with the D-pad, making it much easier to track multiple enemies as you move around some more complex spaces.
Is there anything particularly Scottish about the CRTV’s design? When playing Silent Hill: Townfall, I felt like I learned about the country’s electricity system with that keycard-in-the-closet section.
There’s nothing in particular about the CRTV that is Scottish per se; it’s just something that fits that era particularly well. Not everyone would have one–especially not in a working-class island town!–but you maybe knew someone who did, or always wanted one if you were browsing an Argos catalogue in the ’90s. It’s just like a portable cassette player–has a connection with that time and place, I guess.
Townfall’s CRTV is used for stealth, puzzles, and story in different ways.
Do you or anyone on the team still collect things like this today? I’m 37, so I’m really into ’90s nostalgia right now, and things like Backrooms and Silent Hill: Townfall have warped my Instagram algorithm to show me a lot of that stuff, though I don’t own any of it myself.
Oh, we have a collection! Pretty much every bit of content you see on the CRTV in-game was actually played through a collection of different real pocket TVs or broadcast monitors. I run the signals from the game engine into these screens, and then generally distort the signal with static, magnets, and deliberately loose cables, and sort of “play” the interference and static like an instrument, varying its intensity or abruptness in time with dialogue or key moments.
I’d have a camera setup pointing at the screen, covered in sheets and filters to remove reflections, and film the “performance” of these scenes. This way, I’d pick up the real static and distortion, not faking it in software. It would also pick up different pixel grids for each type of screen–a 480p broadcast monitor versus a small LCD pocket TV would give you different pixel densities and layouts, which I would use depending on the scene or use case.
So over the years I’ve built up a collection of half-broken TVs and monitors, and still use them in production to this day. It’s one of the most fun parts of the job, and I could talk about it for hours!
I’m assuming you agree with me here, and please feel free to disagree if not, but what is it about the ’90s that feels so right for horror?
I think it’s back to that cusp of technology thing. You can use old PCs to read basic emails, or receive signals that break up convincingly in a cinematic way. The more you move into the 2000s and the digital era comes in, the more you lose some of that. When digital TV breaks up, it usually just stops, which is no fun visually!
The main thing I think, though, is that texture, static, and tangible form factor all ground the player. You can be in an unbelievable situation in a dreamscape, and still feel scared because the thing in your hand is relatable in some way. You can imagine feeling that in your hand subconsciously, so I think that just lowers the barrier to immersion a little. We talk a lot internally about “weaponising nostalgia”–taking that familiar thing that you connect with in an “Oh, I remember this!” way and then making it tell you horrible things!
Silent Hill: Townfall is out now on PC and PS5. In GameSpot’s Silent Hill: Townfall review, I spoke of how the game completes the series’ comeback with a third consecutive great entry. “}]] Read More GameSpot – All Content
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