P.T: Silent Hills - The Scariest Game Never Played
On August 12th 2014, the world of survival horror gaming was abuzz with the release of P.T, a demo of what was to be the ninth instalment of the famed Silent Hill series from Konami.
P.T [Initialism for Playable Teaser] first began in mid-2012 when Kojima expressed interest in creating the ninth instalment of the Silent Hill series. As the Vice President of Konami at the time and founder of Kojima Productions, a then subsidiary of Konami, the project was green-lit almost immediately and work got underway on what was to be eventually titled “Silent Hills”.
Upon release, P.T was met with critical acclaim around the world. The premise, while simple, brought with it gaming elements not previously seen in the franchise, the most notable being the switch to first person.
While previous Silent Hill games were set in third person, allowing the player to see their character in action, P.T was set in first person, played through the eyes of the protagonist. This change limited the player’s field of view, creating a sense of dread towards what lay outside their vision.
A change which also played into the game’s other new focus: psychological immersion.
Previously, players in Silent Hill were left to fight desperately against mutilated monsters with only little supplies. P.T was the series’ first shift away from this style of gameplay, trading the frenetic atmosphere for a highly detailed and anxiety-inducing environment.
Set entirely in the L shaped hallway of a suburban home, P.T casts the player into a slow burn of tension and unease. As the player makes their way down the hallway, they are met with various artefacts hinting to the lives of the people who once lived there.
Beer bottles and pill packets litter the floor and cabinets. Family photos hang shattered and torn across the walls. But this is only the beginning. As the player passes through the doorway at the end of the hall, they find themselves re-entering the same hallway, only changed, and with each loop, the house begins to descend further into chaos.
At first, the changes are small. Cockroaches scurry across walls. A nearby radio reports news on the grisly details of a murder-suicide. A light flickers. But as the loop continues to repeat, the player hears a baby crying and people banging on the doors in adjacent rooms, windows shatter seemingly on their own and ominous messages begin to appear scrawled across the walls. But the worst is yet to come.
The game takes a turn when one of the previously closed doors leading to a bathroom is found to be open. Entering the bathroom, the player finds in the sink a distended human fetus, still alive and breathing. The fetus then turns to the player, speaking in a grown man’s voice, “You got fired, so you drowned your sorrows in booze… you remember, right? Exactly ten months back”. A line that appears to reference the life of the character the player inhabits.
In the hallway, the player is approached by the ghostly corpse of a pregnant woman, before she suddenly disappears in the flickering light. Auditory horrors amplify as the sounds of a violent murder taking place ring out through the house until suddenly, all is quiet, and the landline phone rings.
Answering the call, the player hears only three words. “You’ve been chosen”. The screen then fades to black and transitions to a cut scene in which the protagonist wanders a darkened suburban street and is revealed to be played by Norman Reedus, known for his role as Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead television series.
The conclusion of this twisted experience left fans of the genre hopeful for more in the game’s final release. Hopes that were dashed in April of 2015, when Konami announced that the project had been cancelled. Soon after, P.T was removed from the PlayStation store permanently, meaning that anyone who hadn’t already downloaded the game would never be able to play it. A decision that left critics and fans dumbfounded.
Why would a publisher want to axe a project that received nothing but praise? The answer, it appears, lay behind the closed doors of Konami and Kojima studios, but may have been hinted at throughout P.T itself.
It appears that the downfall of P.T and the subsequent Silent Hills game began in October 2013, when Kojima was demoted from his Vice President position at Konami ten months prior to the release of P.T. An event that gives potential new meaning to the words of the in-game fetus, “You got fired, so you drowned your sorrows in booze… you remember, right? Exactly ten months back”.
In March 2015, Konami then removed any mention of Hideo Kojima and Kojima Productions from its Metal Gear solid website and marketing material for the games; games that were synonymous with the Kojima name. It was at this point that the writing was on the wall. Kojima’s relationship with Konami was falling apart. A trouble believed to have stemmed from the company’s new direction: lucrative pay-to-play mobile games and the Pachinko industry.
On April 1st 2015, Hideki Hayakawa, producer of Konami’s hugely popular mobile game “Dragon Quest”, was appointed president of Konami, and announced that the company would be pursuing mobile games aggressively moving forward.
These mobile games were simple, cheap to manufacture and quick to generate revenue. A stark contrast to Kojima’s games, which were praised for their in-depth narrative and high-quality visuals, but took years of time and money to create. A business model that Konami was apparently no longer willing to partake in.
That same month, Konami then announced that Silent Hills was cancelled and P.T was removed from the PlayStation store.
But while the world was disappointed that the game’s potential would never be fully realised, looking back, it’s possible that Kojima knew his time with Konami and Silent Hill was coming to an end, and cryptically told the world in his own way.
Upon finishing the game, prior to the final cut scene playing, a voice speaks to the player over a black screen:
“Dad was such a drag. Every day he’d eat the same kind of food, dress the same, sit in front of the same kind of games… Yeah, he was just that kind of guy. But then one day, he goes and kills us all! He couldn’t even be original about the way he did it. I’m not complaining… I was dying of boredom anyway.”
Although never confirmed by Kojima, it is believed that this message may have been a commentary on the fallout, with Konami taking on the role of “Dad”, and the person speaking being Kojima, prophesying the video game giant “killing off” his projects.
If that is the case, all of this suggests that while the game was branded as a teaser for the upcoming Silent Hill game, it may have instead been Hideo Kojima’s way of showing the world what he was capable of, what he had gone through and where he was headed before he left Konami.
While to this day it remains an incredibly well-crafted, terrifying experience, years after its cancellation, P.T is so much more than just a scary game. It’s a piece of history, representing the subliminal death rattle of an artist’s vision at the hands of corporate interest.
Text by Ben Cooke
