A PT Remake Would’ve Been Out This Week, But….
In 2014, Konami announced that famed nutty game developer Hideo Kojima would be leaving Metal Gear aside and tackling another one of the company’s properties: Silent Hill. This was announced in offbeat Kojima fashion by disguising the reveal within a free demo for a mysterious game that went only by the initials “PT.”
The weekend it appeared on PS4, everyone praised its unique take on the survival horror genre and many critics said it was one of the scariest games they’d ever played, despite being so short. Completing the demo revealed the game’s true title: “SILENT HILLS,” coming soon.
Except it wasn’t coming. This was right on the eve of a sinister regime change at Konami, one that would result in some of the most worker-unfriendly and consumer-unfriendly behaviors to be seen by any company in the world this decade. Not only was Silent Hills cancelled, the PT demo was removed from the PS4 servers entirely. The copies that exist on user hard drives are all that will ever exist, for it cannot be downloaded again by anyone.
A teenage game designer by the handle “Qimsar” decided the only way to keep this piece of history accessible was to remake the entire game from the ground up. This was to be the weekend that the PT remake became freely available across the Internet, but….you can guess what happened.
Despite Konami having no intention to ever let PT out of their vaults again, they wouldn’t allow anyone else to do anything with it either. Qimsar, however, is not bitter about it. He said the phone conversation he had with a Konami representative was polite and forthcoming:
“He told me that my remake was popular (which from the way he spoke, it sounded like it was very popular) around the office and that because of my remake, Konami had a strong resurgence of a desire to make legitimate games again (as opposed to Pachinko machines, mobile games, sports games, (which, I guess they’re all ‘legitimate games’ but you get what I’m saying) etc.).”
That phone call ended with an offer for an internship, the prospect of which sent Qimsar over the moon. Time will tell if the man was lying about “legitimate games again” but he knew how to shut this guy up. The PT remake, despite being 100% complete and due to launch this weekend, has been shelved. Like PT itself, this video is all that most of you will experience…