Silent Hill’s fog started with a lighting system that was too demanding to render. Keiichiro Toyama told the story in a conversation with Frédérick Raynal, who came to Japan for The Tenth Mosaic, an event celebrating game culture. Toyama is the creator of Silent Hill and Siren. Raynal made Alone in the Dark, one of the founding games of 3D horror.

Toyama says he has regarded Raynal as an unofficial mentor of sorts. Looking back, he said that in Japan all he had to go on were a few screenshots in magazines, and he could only imagine how the game was made.

Read moreFumito Ueda and Eric Chahi in conversation at The Tenth Mosaic

The Silent Hill project got moving in response to Resident Evil’s huge success. Toyama wanted to avoid copying it, so he focused on one area where Silent Hill could clearly stand apart: its world. To separate it from the more action-oriented Resident Evil, that world drew on the Cthulhu Mythos.

According to Toyama, the biggest key to that difference was lighting. The team’s main programmer prototyped a point-light system of their own, since the PlayStation did not officially support point lights. But the rendering was so demanding that Toyama was told it could display little more than part of a house.

Around then, while working out the game’s world, Toyama had read Stephen King’s The Mist and was drawn to the idea of something lurking deep in thick fog. When he brought this up, a programmer suggested that inverting the process that drew darkness could double as fog. Toyama took the idea, and that is how Silent Hill’s fog came about, he says.

Raynal also has a story of working around technical limits. Alone in the Dark, Raynal recalls, was a clumsy, unfinished game. Even the story, by Raynal’s account, was added afterward as an excuse for the rough graphics.

The idea behind starting in the attic, Raynal says, was simply getting out of the house. Like a film about escaping a house, the game begins on the top floor on purpose, so the player has a whole journey down and out. Raynal described this as a cheat, not a narrative necessity.

A scene in the basement wine cellar of Alone in the Dark

Raynal called 2Dark, a game about sneaking in by using light and darkness, one that takes lighting as far as it can go.

The first game is available on Steam as Alone in the Dark 1.

The route from the attic to the outside may look different once you know what its maker was aiming for.