You know, it's funny. I was an avid gamer when I was a kid, and if it hadn't been for my roommate Dave, I wouldn't have gotten back into it.
To give you an idea, the last console I played relentlessly was a Nintendo Gamecube. I missed the Wii and the PS2 & 3. Thanks to tax returns, I was able to get a PS4 and enjoy this new generation of amazing games.
The reason I'm telling you this is because, perhaps fortunately, I didn't get my PS4 until around 2017, so I missed P.T.
P.T., for those who don't know, was a playable teaser published by Konami in August of 2014. It was a first-person psychological horror game with a very simple play tactic: you walk along a hallway, only to walk through the door at the end and end up at the beginning of the same hallway. As you continue to walk through it, things slowly change. There are radio broadcasts about a father who murdered his own family; a deformed fetus appears in the sink of a bathroom; cockroaches swarm out of the cracks in the doors; loud bangs and noises are heard all around you; cryptic messages appear in blood on the walls.
Eventually, the player is treated to the ghastly sight of Lisa, a hostile poltergeist that you are completely unable to fight. If the player solved all of the puzzles and won, it would be revealed to them that the protagonist was actually a man played by Norman Reedus (from The Walking Dead) and that P.T. was actually a teaser for what would have been a new installment of the Silent Hill series, Silent Hills.
By the time I'd gotten my PS4, however, not only had Silent Hills been cancelled, but P.T. had been removed from the PS store. It was also removed from all the online gaming services; people began selling PlayStations with P.T. already installed on eBay, and those auctions were eventually pulled by the site.
So... why the hell would a company be so adamant about making sure a little playable teaser was unavailable to the public? The official statement was that Kojima Productions, the developers of the game, had taken the series in a direction that Konami, the owners of the Silent Hill series, was not interested in taking it in.
I'm terrified that I may have discovered the real reason.
In 2019, it was reported that a game hacker named Lance McDonald discovered that the ghost in the game was tethered behind the player's character early on. This hostile poltergeist is literally just behind the player for the majority of the game. This is why, from early on, the player can see unexplained shadows and hear strange noises from the area they just left.
The development team has never answered the question as to why they took this approach. They could have easily put in coding that allowed certain auditory or visual scares at certain moments but instead they chose to write a code that would make the ghost impossible to see but always there, following you.
I have a terrible feeling that Hideo Kojima and the other developers tapped into something that wasn't meant to be tapped into.
I recently went onto a few gamer chat sites to see if anyone had played it. I was surprised to get a few replies back fairly quickly. A good number of people seemed to have played it before it was taken down and they all had the same opinion: it was an awesome teaser for what would have been an amazing game, and it was a crime that we'd never get to see what would have come from it.
However, a few people mentioned that after playing the game, they began to see strange things.
Of course, all of these people from the site were complete strangers. Most of them lived in different states; some of them even lived in different countries. But they all said that not long after they'd completed P.T., they started to see something just outside of their peripheral vision. It always seemed to be the same thing: a pale face, with its right eye missing and the left eye misshapen and seeming to lightly glow. They described a mouth that seemed to be smiling and grimacing at the same time, with yellowed teeth and some kind of yellowish viscous liquid rolling down the chin. One of them included a picture of the ghost featured in the game, and of course it fit the descriptions to a tee.
They said that they saw it only at night, never during the day. It always seemed to happen in the hallways of their homes. They'd be heading to the bathroom in the middle of the night or just getting home from a late shift and heading to the bedroom when they'd see it, if only for a second. They swore that a few times, they felt fetid breath on the back of their neck.
Now, obviously I'm deeply skeptical about this. It's entirely possible that it's just a bunch of people using the anonymity of the internet to take the piss out of a stranger. It's entirely possible.
But if it IS just that, then that still leaves the question of why Konami not only cancelled the game, but why they went to great lengths and spent God knows how much money to make sure that this simple playable teaser would never be played again.
Were they cheating us... or protecting us?
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