Hideo Kojima’s OD trailer hides an obscure (and bizarre) Silent Hill reference

Very little is still known about Hideo Kojima’s upcoming OD horror game, but it’s been discovered that its recent trailer from The Game Awards contains an incredibly hard-to-spot reference to Konami’s Silent Hill series.

Very little is known about Hideo Kojima’s upcoming OD horror game, but eagle-eyed viewers have spotted a secret reference to Konami’s Silent Hill series in the game’s recent The Game Awards trailer. 

You wouldn’t think there’d be anything to hide, considering the trailer just consists of the heads of actors Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and Udo Kier talking into the camera. However, Central Xbox spotted a hidden reference to Silent Hill in the trailer, which they posted on X on Dec. 11 and has since been verified by VGC. As it turns out, it’s possible to spot letters inside Kier’s mouth if you zoom in and turn the brightness levels up.

The letters only appear at very specific frames in the trailer and there are five of them in total, which spell out Atami, the name of a Japanese city in the Shizuoka Prefecture. As far as I can tell, neither Atami nor Shizuoka have any connection to Kojima or his studio, Kojima Productions, but that’s not what has caught peoples’ interest.

If you write Shizuoka in kanji, it spells “静岡”. This can be split into two separate characters; “静” can mean “quiet” or “silent” while “岡” means “hill.” Ergo, combined they can read as Silent Hill, which feels too specific to be a coincidence.

It’s well known that Kojima was working on a new Silent Hill game, revealed in 2014 via the now no longer available P.T. teaser, but Konami scrapped the project. Between this new tease and the fact that the door Kojima walked out of when he appeared on-stage at The Game Awards looked near identical to the one from P.T., is Kojima implying that OD has some ties to Silent Hill?

Honestly, probably not. At the time of writing, there’s no mention of Konami having any involvement with OD‘s development. Plus, a GameSpot report from 2015 alleged that Kojima and Konami had fallen out. With Kojima’s name removed from promotional material for upcoming Metal Gear projects (including Metal Gear Solid 5‘s box art) and Konami preventing him from accepting awards at that year’s The Game Awards (via Polygon), it’s fair to say the split wasn’t amicable. It’s hard to imagine Kojima would ever want to work with Konami again.

As such, it’s best to assume this Silent Hill tease is just someone (be it Kojima or someone else who worked on the trailer) having some cheeky fun. Or maybe Kojima simply plans to repurpose ideas from his cancelled Silent Hill game for OD.