Silent Hill creator teams up with other industry legends to form Bokeh Game Studio

Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama joined forces with game designer Junya Okura (Gravity Rush, Siren) and game designer / producer Kazunobu Sato (The Last Guardian, Siren). The trio announced a new studio called Bokeh Game Studio.

“Bokeh” is derived the Japanese “bo-ke,” which refers to the camera blur technique

The studio was actually founded on August 13, when Toyama left Sony’s Japan studio. He became the creative director and CEO of Bokeh, with Sato appointed the chief operating officer (COO) and Okura the chief technology officer (CTO).

“Honestly, I can’t forget the atmosphere we used to work in back in the day,” says Toyama reminiscing his work on the Silent Hill, Siren and Gravity Rush series. Bokeh Game Studio is the trio’s attempt to recreate the atmosphere of “freedom” when they could make games “on a whim,” “just improvising.”

While acknowledging the challenges of going indie, the founders cherish the opportunity to “focus on creating games.” According to Sato, a lot of devs that they used to work with will be joining the studio too.

Not a lot of details are available on the studio’s debut project. However, Keiichiro Toyama voices the ambition “to fulfill our fans’ expectations,” hinting at a project in the vein of Silent Hill and Siren. Glimpses of the concept art shown in the announcement video seem to corroborate this.

Concept art. Image credit: Bokeh Game Studio

The development is expected to take 2-3 years, with the game ultimately coming to PC and consoles. This the devs said in an interview with Famitsu.

The announcement video

This is definitely good news for the Silent Hill fan community. Even if the rumored Silent Hill reboot is not announced at the Game Awards 2020, something even better might be in development, like an entire new IP from the people who created the beloved franchise. As for the Siren and Gravity Rush series, Toyama hopes to maintain his good relationship with Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan. It means he might still return to work on Sony’s properties as a third-party developer.