Hideo Kojima and Jordan Peele teased their new collaboration O.D at last week's The Game Awards, with a creepy and strange look at Kojima Productions' return to horror. And while O.D is an original project for Kojima Productions, it also contains a very well-hidden Easter egg to a previous project: Kojima's attempt to create a new Silent Hill game while at Konami.
An eagle-eyed member of the Silent Hill subreddit discovered hidden text in the O.D teaser, seeing the letters ATAMI – each letter for just a single frame – in actor Udo Kier's mouth as he pronounces the phonetic pangram that repeats throughout the video. As Redditor GlazicBlr noted in the post about their discovery, Atami is a city in Shizuoka Prefecture in Japan. The kanji that make up Shizuoka's name (静岡), taken separately, translate to “silent” (静) and “hill” (岡).
You can see the hidden letters in Kier's mouth in the gallery below:
What does this all mean? Possibly nothing more than a nod to the project Silent hillsin other words PT, which Kojima and his team made with Norman Reedus, Guillermo del Toro, and Junji Ito before Konami crushed it. But it could be a signal that it is O.D will continue some of what Kojima wanted to do Silent hills – namely: “to make you shit your pants.”
According to Kojima Productions, O.D will explore “the concept of testing your fear threshold, and what it means to (overdose) on fear – while blurring the lines of gaming and film.” Images of what appears to be O.Dwhen it was known as Overdose, was leaked last year by an unknown source. That footage showed a virtual version of actor Margaret Qualley, who appeared as Mama in Kojima Productions' Death strandingnavigating dark, deserted hallways and being chased by a shadowy figure.
O.D will feature some faces new to Kojima Productions, including Sophia Lillis (Asteroid city, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves), Hunter Schafer (Euphoria, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes), and Udo Kier (Meat for Frankenstein, Suspiria). Peele is said to be “one of many talented storytellers involved in the project.”
PT And Silent hills were unveiled ten years ago in August. Konami officially canceled the project a year later, after Kojima and the main creators behind the Metal Gear Solid franchise left the publisher to form a new Kojima Productions.