Hideo Kojima showed off a creepy trailer for his upcoming game, OD, at The Game Awards last week. Featuring three different actors speaking what sounds like creepy gibberish at the camera, it didn’t tell us a whole lot about what this game will even be. But since its reveal, fans have noticed a few Silent Hill references cleverly hidden within. Spooky.
Back in 2014, when Hideo Kojima was still working for game publisher Konami, he and film director Guillermo del Toro were working on a new Silent Hill game. A playable teaser appropriately titled P.T. teased Silent Hills, a game that would have starred actor Norman Reedus (who, along with Guillermo del Toro, would go on to appear in Kojima’s Death Stranding in 2019). The demo featured first-person gameplay set in a series of looping rooms in a haunted building (or some other manifestation of horror). As Kojima would go on to leave Konami in 2015, the Silent Hills project as it was known ended, and P.T. disappeared from the PlayStation store.
The teaser left its mark, however. It remains a notable part of the PS4’s life, and arguably has influenced a number of other horror titles such as Resident Evil 7. It’s even been remade by fans over the years. And now it’s clear that references to P.T. and Silent Hill itself are buried in Kojima’s first official reveal of OD.
The name ‘Atami’ is hidden in the OD trailer
At around the 42-44 second mark on the OD – TGA 2023 Teaser Trailer, you can spot the letters A T A M I in the mouth of cult actor Udo Kier(Armageddon, Johnny Mnemonic, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2). Fans were quick to point this out and have begun theorycrafting about what it could mean.
It’s very hard to see this in motion at full speed if you don’t know what to look for, and it’s made doubly hard by internet compression on YouTube.
Atami, a city in the Japanese prefecture Shizuoka (which, as some might know, itself loosely translates to “silent hill”), is suspected by some to be the source of inspiration for the town in the original 1999 PSX horror title Silent Hill.
The trailer and stage set for OD also referenced P.T.
That big door Kojima walked through on stage at The Game Awards wasn’t just a prop. As fans have pointed out, it looks like a direct reference to the start of P.T. You can see this door again in actress Sophia Lillis’ eyes at 1:14 in the OD trailer.
Fans also suspect that a quick shot of an MRI scan of a brain in the OD trailer harkens back to the brightness slider in P.T..
So yeah, leave it to Kojima to work with those damn brightness sliders in a creative way.
Kojima’s reveal of OD, despite taking up much more time than was given to most people at The Game Awards, was light on details. Though we do know that Jordan Peele is working with him. Cool, I guess.
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