Associate Producer Tomm Hulett to 1UP:

The addition of that source material was a boon for God of War and Bluepoint but it caused huge problems for Huelett and his team at Konami in making Silent Hill. "We got all the source code that Konami had on file -- which it turns out wasn't the final release version of the games! D'oh!" says Huelett, "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. A lot of assets such as textures and sound had to be taken out of the compiled game, and that brings with it a host of unique issues, especially taken on top of the tricky coding workarounds at play in the original games. We certainly had our hands full. I think at one point [Silent Hill 3 protagonist] Heather was blue."

I guess it makes Hijinx look a bit better, Konami less so. But I guess after 2 years of development, canceling the project and eating the costs didn't look any more appealing than dealing with the bad publicity.

Yeah apparently Konami's code archives are rubbish from what's been said over the years. It does shed some light on why these ports were absolute rubbish, though.

That's crazy. Not very surprising for Konami, but still crazy.

Reminds me of my boss who wants to delete every file he can. So when ever a client comes back and asks us for a copy or even for new assets using the old art. we have to reproduce it.

@LevelUpAdrian said:

Yeah apparently Konami's code archives are rubbish from what's been said over the years. It does shed some light on why these ports were absolute rubbish, though.

They should take note of Bluepoint's (God of War and ICO/SotC HD collections) approach mentioned in the article. They basically start by rebuilding the game from the final retail disc, bypassing any issues with the source code/art archives, and insuring they're working with what was actually released.

Read this on Eurogamer, they sure have botched this one. Considering the great work that Sony has been doing it seems heinous that Konami can get away with this without being torn apart by the press

You've got to be kidding me. How could they sell this?

Remember how fucking successful Konami was around the turn of the millenium? Symphony of the Night, Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2, and Silent Hill 1 and 2? How badly do you have to fuck up to go from there to here? Late 00s Konami might as well be Late 90s Sega in terms of fortunes changing.

wait, so.. if it's konami's bad, how did the mgs remasters turn out so well?

@killacam: Kojima supervised those

@killacam:

Bluepoint's track record with God of War, Metal Gear, and Team Ico's game shows that their method might be preferable: Don't use old code, use the finished game itself. "We don't use archive data," says O'Neil, "We take retail discs of the game and reverse engineer them. That way we can be 100% sure we have all the final retail data and that it matches up. That takes a lot time. Then to get it working, we basically have to go in and change every single piece of data. We get the code and we use that to build a PC version of the game. It's not something meant to ship, so a lot things don't work. It doesn't have sound for example. The engine though is the same, the data layout is the same, so we get that working first. If you have a lot of stuff coming through the VU assembler [with a PS2 game], you need to do lot of super detailed work to convert it all. We don't emulate any of this stuff, we hand convert it."

So work from old code that may or may not reflect the actual product, or reverse engineer everything and port that to the new console. Both options don't sound appealing.

@Bocam Hideo 4 prez

@Gaff What'd I do?

@killacam: I thought you were wondering how the MGS Remasters turned out so well? Bluepoint, well, reverse engineered the retail discs?

You mean to tell me that the publisher who makes the Glee games lied to us?

Oh, say it ain't so. -_-

Shady video game industry being shady. What's worse is that you had all the voice actors splurging volumes of excellence about working on the project. WAY TO GO, TRANSPARENCY!

Since when is final retail code ever bug-free these days? Discuss.

@AndrewB said:

Since when is final retail code ever bug-free these days? Discuss.

Not the point. The point is that the HD Collection team had to spend time that could've been used making sure they were good ports trying to fix problems with the code, problems that don't exist in any other version of either game and could've been avoided by making sure they had actual final code.

@Gaff said:

@killacam: I thought you were wondering how the MGS Remasters turned out so well? Bluepoint, well, reverse engineered the retail discs?

oh. yeah. just meant because they were both konami.. so it seemed that konami taking all the blame was a little harsh.

@Dagbiker said:

Reminds me of my boss who wants to delete every file he can. So when ever a client comes back and asks us for a copy or even for new assets using the old art. we have to reproduce it.

Reading your comment made my heart beat faster. Why would anyone do that? I have everything I've ever worked on sitting on my hard drive. It's all backed up on an external drive next to me as incremental dailies with full weekly (4x), monthly (12x), and yearly (unlimited) backups. It's also synced to the cloud and a machine that I have physical access to elsewhere. Permanently deleting work is crazy to me.

@louiedog said:

@Dagbiker said:

Reminds me of my boss who wants to delete every file he can. So when ever a client comes back and asks us for a copy or even for new assets using the old art. we have to reproduce it.

Reading your comment made my heart beat faster. Why would anyone do that? I have everything I've ever worked on sitting on my hard drive. It's all backed up on an external drive next to me as incremental dailies with full weekly (4x), monthly (12x), and yearly (unlimited) backups. It's also synced to the cloud and a machine that I have physical access to elsewhere. Permanently deleting work is crazy to me.

Honestly I have no clue.