(some music as you read) – One Pace Before Jack.mp3
P.T., or Playable Teaser, was a video game demo that mysteriously appeared on the PlayStation Store in late 2014. To unsuspecting players, it looked like any other game: made by an “indie” company, with a cryptic description and an unassuming cover showing a lone tree stump in a barren forest. Best of all, it was free. What greeted players upon download, however, was a twisted, winding horror experience that the internet, and the gaming industry at large, would have to wrestle with for years. Konami Digital Entertainment later came forward to announce P.T. as the teaser for their newest installment in the Silent Hill series, with gaming legend Hideo Kojima and film visionary Guillermo Del Toro attached to the project. As more information about the game trickled out, and as more and more people paid attention, the consensus about the new Silent Hill was clear: if it’s anything like P.T., it would be the scariest horror game made in years, if not ever.
This sentiment persisted… for all of 8 months, until the game was ultimately canceled and P.T. was wiped from the PlayStation Store in early 2015. Since then, a plethora of horror games such as Visage, Allison Road, and RE7: Biohazard have tried to fill the hole P.T. left in the bleeding hearts of horror fans, either directly or indirectly. To truly understand the tragedy of P.T., we must understand why it resonated so well with audiences in the first place.
A Familiar Fog…
Mainstream gaming looked different in 2014. We saw the rollout of heavy-hitter consoles like the PS4 and Xbox One, bringing major advances in gaming optimization straight to consumers. While these companies offered great engines, they gave us crappy games, and the industry was starting to get tired. Titles like Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Destiny were widely perceived as disappointments that revealed some troubling patterns emerging within modern game design. So, by the time Gamescom (the world’s biggest video game industry fair) rolled around, the world was excited, but apprehensive about the slate of new games being announced.
The night before Gamescom, P.T. hit the PlayStation Store. Published by then-unknown 7780s Studios, the game was downloaded by thousands of eager fans awaiting the convention. As the night went on, however, unassuming players realized this was no regular demo. When you open the game, you are shoved into a first-person perspective in what looks like a bare room, with a single door facing you. Opening it leads you into a hallway; one in a house with a history, but no inhabitants*. You turn the corner and continue walking until you reach another door, leading back to the beginning of the hallway. A loop. Neverending. Every rotation different, more possessed and infected than the last. This is it. This is the game.
*Yet.
While I could talk about the story and contents of P.T. for hours, I’ll highlight only some of my favorite parts of the game: (If you want to get into the story of P.T., you should play the updated PC/Mac/Linux ports. Playing this for the first time is something I wish I could relive. Links will be at the end. Also, if you do want to play this for yourself, skip the next section.)
Photo Fragments: Hallway Gallery
After solving the final puzzle and breaking the loop, our protagonist is revealed to be none other than Norman Reedus (The Walking Dead TV series), who walks away from the camera into the thick, familiar fog… of Silent Hill.
First person in the world to finish the puzzle and catch the reveal LIVE ON STREAM: Streamer Soapy Warpig
7780’s Studios was unmasked as a fake company used to obscure the names of the project’s true mastermind duo: Hideo Kojima, creator of the stealth classic Metal Gear Solid, and Guillermo Del Toro, legendary fantasy-horror film director. This reveal, and Konami’s subsequent official announcement at Gamescom the following night, shocked the industry and shorted power grids worldwide. Gamers and nerds who spent hours on internet forums decoding P.T.‘s twisted puzzles, and the people on the sidelines watching in awe, were hyped. People rejoiced and jubilated. But as the initial blow faded away, a new, lingering emotion began to swell. As the dust settled, people began to wonder: This is Silent Hill???
Newspaper Clippings: A Silent Hill History
In so many words, the world was shocked that Konami had the balls to take their failing IP back to its roots as innovators in survival horror. Coupled with the reputation of the people involved (Kojima, whose insanely influential Metal Gear Solid effectively created the stealth genre, and Del Toro’s vision for otherworldly creature horror), Silent Hills was destined for greatness. P.T. won various awards at the end of 2014, including FEAR Awards’ Scariest Game and Giant Bomb’s Best Horror Game Of The Year, and the acclaim kept rising.
But all good things must come to an end. The internet, which came together to solve the mysteries of P.T., was not aware that it would be forced to once more come together and grieve.
Down The Drain, A Baby…
As Kojima worked on rebooting Silent Hill, he was also working on the fifth installment of his MGS series, whose budget was increasing and release date was pushed back, causing major tensions with Konami Execs. At the same time, the company began pivoting out of the AAA market and shifting toward developing data-mining, pay-to-win mobile game slop, further souring the K-K relationship. Leading up to the release of MSG V, Konami removed Kojima’s name from all promotional material and stopped housing Kojima Productions internally, putting the future of all Kojima-related games up in the air.
In April of 2015, Guillermo Del Toro was asked about the progress of Silent Hills at a panel at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where he responded with a simple “it’s not happening.” Two days later, Konami announced the complete cancellation of Silent Hills. For an evil company like Konami, though, this was not enough. In the same statement, they declared that P.T. would be completely wiped from the PlayStation Store, giving players just two days to preserve this work of art on their consoles.
The fallout was immediate. The internet exploded; not in happiness and jubilation, but in utter rage and disappointment. The decision to not only kill the project but completely flush it down the drain made Konami the subject of ridicule within the gaming community for years, among other things. PS4s with P.T. still installed on them began selling online for upwards of $2,000. Illegal copies of the game hit the shelves of torrent websites like wildfire. Konami might’ve murdered P.T., but the internet did everything in its power to keep it alive, one way or another.
An Open Door…
P.T., much like its main antagonist, has lingered in the halls of survival horror since its cancellation in 2015. Immediately after Konami’s decision, indie game company SadSquare Studios developed Visage (2018) out of direct longing for the claustrophobic, paranormal experience of the 2014 demo. With rave reviews, the industry realized there was a new untapped market: P.T. clones. In a full-circle moment, Capcom responded to Konami with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017), taking the first-person perspective and level design of P.T. and blending it with the series’ classic sci-fi horror aesthetic.
In my mind, P.T. sits comfortably within a very particular lineage of indie horror games that defined an entire generation. Born out of the hunger for fresh and exciting takes on horror, game devs in their moms’ basements were obsessed with discovering new, truly deranged ways to torture not only their protagonists, but the players themselves. Titles like Amnesia (2010), IMSCARED (2012), and Slender (2012) kept young children like myself up for nights on end and made even tenured gamers jump. Games like these were unseen, and P.T. takes from this innovative undercurrent and inspires more games. This feedback loop led to games like Doki Doki Literature Club (2017) that kept reaching through the screen and grabbing players directly, creating formative horror experiences that are being passed down to young horror fans looking for their next twisted fix.
Epilogue: …and A Loop That Never Closed.
In 2023, Hideo Kojima released a teaser for his newest game in development, OD. Starring Sophia Illis and Hunter Schafer, and co-written by fantastic horror filmmaker and comedian Jordan Peele, the game has been rumored to be Kojima’s attempt at putting the pieces of P.T. back together. While no confirmation of this has been made, the new game looks amazing in the trailers, and it might give us back a bit of what we lost in 2015.
About 3 weeks ago, dedicated fans finally released a working PC port of P.T., bringing it back into mainstream gaming conversations just in time for Halloween. With the spotlight back on the demo, a new generation of horror fans can finally experience the dark, oppressive terror that took the world by storm over 12 years ago.
In a time when graphics get prettier but gameplay gets shittier, we might be able to use the industry’s obsession with nostalgia to our advantage; maybe P.T. can show the right people where horror should go, and we once again reach new heights. Or maybe the ghost of P.T. will linger around for a couple more years, reminding us of the biggest “what-if?” in horror gaming history.
(click image above for link to LoreanXavier’s PC/Mac/Linux port of the game)
(p.s: you need an official copy of the game file to be able to run the port; luckily, I have an extra… click the text above for the g-drive link to it (totally legal btw). peace 222)
