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Dementium: The Ward is a cult-classic survival horror game first released on the Nintendo DS in 2007. There weren’t a lot of horror games on Nintendo’s handheld, which is most of the reason for Dementium’s cult reputation. It cast you as an amnesiac trapped in a hospital full of zombies and giant worms you had to defeat with various guns and a nightstick. Nintendogs this ain’t.
Developer Renegade Kid originally pitched it to Konami as a Silent Hill game. As director Jools Watsham told NintendoLife, “The person I met with from Konami was rather dismissive and said something to the effect of, ‘We wouldn’t give the Silent Hill IP to a team like yours’. It was quite surprising and very disheartening.”
Renegade Kid tried again years later, using the engine from Dementium 2 to mock up a third-person game to pitch to Konami. “Konami’s response that time wasn’t dismissive like the first time,” Watsham told IGN. “They simply didn’t want to venture into the DS space with a horror title at that time.”
