Suda 51’s The Silver Case is being remade for the West

The first game ever made by Grasshopper Manufacture is to be released in the west for the first time.

The Silver Case was released on PlayStation in Japan in 1999. Now director Goichi Suda (Suda 51) has confirmed a remake in the works for PC.

Eurogamer reports that the remake will be told through a combination of text, photographs, illustrations and 3D animation. It’s being developed by Active Gaming Media, which among other things worked on the English translation of Demon’s Souls and the Japanese translation of Dear Esther.

A 2009 DS port of the game was planned at one stage, although the idea was scrapped when it was decided too much work would be needed to alter the game for western markets. However, these plans changed when Active approached Grasshopper about taking on the work itself.

"When it comes to the gameplay the biggest change is the quiz section of the game," Suda explained. "The game was produced in 1999 and was very strongly focused on knowledge that would be difficult even for Japanese players. Even if we just translated those questions they wouldn’t necessarily be answerable by many players, so we’re updating and changing the contents of the quiz sections.”

Suda 51 also expressed enthusiasm for more remakes in the future.

"It’s impossible for a lot of younger gamers to play a lot of Grasshopper Manufacture titles, even from the PlayStation 2 and Gamecube eras, as you need both the disc and the hardware to play those games,” he added. So it’s becoming very much a reality that since these games can’t be played anymore something needs to be done. That’s a big part of the motivation for doing The Silver Case at this time."