Date: September 2019
Masahiro Ito is best known as the creature designer for the first three Silent Hill video games and is considered a crucial part of the original development team known as Team Silent. Ito was born in 1972 and earned his degree in graphic design at Tama Art University before joining Konami Game Studios in 1997 (Ito, 2006). Ito is a game artist who specialized in creature design as well as background and cover art for many games in the infamous Silent Hill franchise.
His work is known to be inspired by his favorite artist, Francis Bacon, with similar color palettes and fleshy textures (Silent Hill Memories, 2013). Many argue that Ito’s most successful and well-known design is that of the creature known as Pyramid Head, first appearing in Silent Hill 2 and unbeknownst to Ito, would arguably become one of the most well-recognized monsters in the survival horror genre (Ito, 2006). This success, however, has become an emotional pitfall, holding his work back. Ito’s work has made a significant impact on the survival horror genre, combining the psychological trauma of the player character into the monsters he creates.
This article will discuss Masahiro Ito’s personal mastery journey and will conduct a cross-comparative analysis with Robert Greene’s concept of the Darwinian Strategy.
Masahiro Ito’s Creative Task was something that took time and immersion in order to find. While Ito decided to get into the field of art and design by earning a degree from Tama Art University, he had not yet figured out the specifics behind his creative task. In an interview with Silent Hill Paradise, Ito admits he was not interested in working within the horror genre before his work with Team Silent (Silent Hill Paradise, 2016). Ito’s interest in painter, Francis Bacon, however, can be seen as foreshadowing. Bacon’s work is often described as “Raw, dark, visceral” and “nightmarish horror” (Glass, 2019).
The distorted uncanniness of Bacon’s work is something that Ito clearly took inspiration from. Silent Hill and Bacon’s portfolio of work have similar themes of “violence, punishment, redemption, sexuality, death and humanity” (The House of Alexander, 2019). In the behind-the-scenes documentary, “Making of Silent Hill 2”, the narrator explains that the creatures are, “monstrous because their shapes suggest deformed human features” (Silent Hill Memories, 2013). In this short documentary, Ito explains that his design process begins with a “human aspect” to give the players the false hope that his creatures might be people. He then, “undermines this human aspect by giving weird movements to these creatures and by using improbable angles for their bodies based on the mannerisms and movements of drunk people or the tentative walk of young children” (Silent Hill Memories, 2013).
One of the Creative Strategies that Masahiro unknowingly experienced was Serendipity. In his book, “Mastery”, Robert Greene describes this phenomenon as, “the occurrence of something we are not expecting “(Greene, 2012). Greene explains that in order to encourage serendipity, one must “widen their search as far as possible” and “maintain openness and looseness of spirit” (Greene, 2012). One of Masahiro Ito’s moments of serendipity occurred while working at his office at Konami. He explains the inspiration behind the first creature the player encounters in Silent Hill 2 known as Straight-Jacket.
“The idea hit me as I watched a programmer friend who works here. One day, he came to see me, I saw him coming from a long way off. His hands were in his pockets, close to his body and he was wearing a sweatshirt with a hood. He was also listening to his Walkman and walking in a cool way.” (Silent Hill Memories, 2013). One can also see how Ito utilized serendipity through his unique combination of character psychology with creature design.
An example of this can be seen in one of Ito’s tweets explaining, "The head of Bubble Head Nurse is the *metaphor of the suffocated Mary's swollen head under the pillow."(Wilson, 2019).
Another, more complex example is Pyramid Head. According to Stacie Ponder, writer for Kotaku, “He’s a manifestation of the guilt James feels for resenting Mary while she was dying and for eventually killing her himself. Pyramid Head’s oversized, phallic weapons speak to James’s sexual frustration during his wife’s
long illness.
He is James’s tormentor and punisher, both physically and mentally, essentially a manifestation of James’s psyche and self-loathing as they tear him apart.” (Ponder, 2018).
Masahiro Ito’s creative breakthrough were these moments of serendipity. When he became inspired to design the straight-jacket monster based on how his friend had walked in a hoodie and as soon as he implemented analyzing the psychological state of the player character into his design process. This breakthrough was the beginning of Ito’s mastery of creature design.
One emotional pitfall of Masahiro would be the discrepancy between his very precise ideas surrounding the symbolism behind his creatures and the playing audience. An example of this can be seen through his most iconic creation, Pyramid Head. Originally, Pyramid Head was only meant to be in Silent Hill 2 being that he is tied to the main character’s story. In a Rely on Horror article, writer, CJ Melendez analyzes and reports on some of Masahiro Ito’s tweets regarding a new silent hill game. He explains, “It appears the father of the Silent Hill series’ most iconic figures is tired of seeing the character overused just as much as some diehard fans are.” (Melendez, 2017). The biggest issue that Ito faces is not selling out for fan-favorite characters and maintaining his creative edge. Masahiro Ito continues to not give into a routine and continues to try to make new content. As a game designer, this is something that one can imagine many successful designers struggle with: maintaining serendipity and not falling into a routine where everything is done the same.
Ito’s pitfalls according to Robert Greene’s terms would be a dependency on ‘what works’ and conservatism towards new ideas (Greene, 2012). Ito’s story shares similar aspects to Yoky Matsuoka and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s personal tales as told by Robert Greene. Ito’s will and openness to learning different aspects surrounding his career are similar to Matsuoka’s interest in other fields of research in the hope to gain new insights into her robotics. His analysis of the psychology of fear is an interesting combination that many other horror enthusiasts are starting to follow. A journalist for The Psychologist, Christian Jarrett, contributes to this idea in his feature outlining “The Lure of Horror”. He contemplates, “Another intriguing angle for the future is whether insights from psychology could help guide horror writers and producers to develop even scarier material. (Jarrett, 2011). In conjunction with this, Ito’s courage to strive for new ideas and out-of-the-box thinking is analogous to Mozart’s rebellion against his father (Greene, 2012).
While Ito is still currently struggling with some of his emotional pitfalls, he continues to create new art and keep a well-balanced dimensional mind, “ a high level of knowledge about a field of subject and the openness and flexibility to use this knowledge in new and original ways” (Greene, 2012). Masahiro Ito’s ability to allow serendipity, chance, and new kinds of thinking into his life are admirable. His level of mastery in creature design is extremely inspiring in my own journey of mastery in the world of horror games and immersion.
References
Glass, N. (2019, July 29). Why Francis Bacon's portraits of screaming popes and lovers live on. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/style/article/francis-bacon/index.html
Greene, R. (2012). Mastery. New York, NY: Penguin USA.
Ito, M. (2006, March). "暢達nobu_hill_site." 簡単ホームページ作成サービス（無料）-Yahoo！ジオシティーズ (geocities.yahoo.co.jp). Yahoo.
Jarrett, C. (2011). The lure of horror. Psychologist, 24(11), 812–815. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.oclc.fullsail.edu:81/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pbh&AN=67270236&site=ehost-live
Kirkland, E. (2005). Restless dreams in “Silent Hill”: approaches to video game analysis. Journal of Media Practice, 6(3), 167–178. https://doi-org.oclc.fullsail.edu/10.1386/jmpr.6.3.167/1
Masahiro Ito. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://silenthill.fandom.com/wiki/Masahiro_Ito
Melendez, C. J. (2017, August 31). Creator of Silent Hill's Pyramid Head Wants the Character Dead. Retrieved from https://www.relyonhorror.com/latest-news/silent-hill-news/creator-silent-hills-pyramid-head-wants-character-dead/
Ponder, S. (2018, May 10). Silent Hill 2's Pyramid Head Was Pure Sexual Terror. Retrieved from https://kotaku.com/silent-hill-2s-pyramid-head-was-pure-sexual-terror-1825903869
[Silent Hill Memories].(2013, May 1). Making of Silent Hill 2 [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSku98HqIHU&feature=youtu.be
Silent Hill Paradise. (2016, February 2). Creating Silent Hill, an interview with Masahiro Ito. Retrieved from http://www.silenthillparadise.com/news/creating-silent-hill-an-interview-with-masahiro-ito
The House of Alexander. (2019, February 25). Fear for the Flesh: Francis Bacon's Influence on Silent Hill. Retrieved from http://houseofalexander.wiki/fear-for-the-flesh
Wilson, M. (2019, June 12). 'Silent Hill' Artist Masahiro Ito Dishes More Details on Meaning Behind Monsters. Retrieved from https://bloody-disgusting.com/video-games/3566925/silent-hill-artist-masahiro-ito-dishes-details-meaning-behind-monsters/
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