By design, P.T. was supposed to be a mystery. Announced at Gamescom 2014 during PlayStation's press conference, the "playable teaser" from the not-actually-real developer 7780s Studio dropped on the PlayStation Store for free to little fanfare initially; a scary little oddity people downloaded out of curiosity. The twist however was that P.T. was something much more than a new game from an unheard-of studio — it was the reveal of a brand-new Silent Hill game called Silent Hills. And it was being made by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro and starred Walking Dead actor Norman Reedus. Over time, legendary horror manga author Junji Ito would be attached to the project.
And then the game was canceled, a victim of the very-public breakup between Kojima and his longtime employer, Konami. Barely an hour long, it's since been called one of the scariest games of all time, despite not much being known about Silent Hills beyond the teaser, which Konami actually pulled from the PlayStation Store, making it inaccessible to anyone that didn’t already download it.
In a twist of fate, the biggest mystery surrounding P.T. was no longer the secret reveal it contained. The biggest mystery became what exactly Silent Hills was.
Details on Silent Hills, its development, and cancellation have come out over the past five years, but they've been pretty minimal and spread out all over the place. While we unfortunately have no new information to report on the game, we wanted to look back at P.T. in the spirit of Halloween to examine what we know about the game and why it was canceled.
"A Game That Will Make You S--- Your Pants"
In almost every way, P.T. was a ruse. The developer, the name – all of that was intended to trick players into thinking they were playing a demo from a new independent studio trying their hand at making a horror game rather than the reveal of a new entry in one of the industry's most popular horror franchises. In actuality, the teaser was made using Kojima Productions' in-house Fox Engine, the same engine used on Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. According to Kojima, the "quality" was actually downgraded to create an illusion of inexperience. "That was the most difficult thing thus far ... if we raised the bar that high they'd think a big studio was behind it," Kojima told Polygon in 2014.
Kojima’s games — especially by this point — are complex. They're often systems-heavy and require a player to learn and operate within those systems before learning how to bend and break its rules. P.T. was kind of like that, but it was deceptively simple on its surface. Loading into the teaser, players woke up on a concrete floor facing a door. When they opened that door, they walked down a nondescript suburban hallway. At the end of the hallway was another door. Once opened, the player found themselves staring at the start of the hallway they'd just walked through. And then it happened again. And again. And again. Until they were able to figure out the game's tricks.
Originally, Kojima said he thought it'd take players at least a week to discover the Silent Hills teaser waiting at the end of P.T. It took them a couple hours. But still, there were a lot of puzzles and mysteries to overcome in the game's looping hallway, like requiring the player poke out the eyeball of a character in a picture, decipher a message scribbled on a wall, or find pieces of a torn-up photograph strewn throughout the level (the most devious of which was actually hidden in the pause menu). And even when the secret was out, the notoriety of P.T. and Silent Hills still spread. Talk of how scary the short demo was also helped built interest. As players walked ad nauseum around the hallway, they were stalked by a ghost named Lisa, who could occasionally be heard moving or crying. At one point, if you look up toward the ceiling, you'll find her watching you from the second-floor banister. Take too long solving the game's puzzles or spend too much time in one place and Lisa will appear right in front of your face, effectively killing the player. Jump-scare compilations became very popular for P.T.
Click here to watch embedded mediaAnd then of course there was the teaser at the end. Once the player frees themselves from the hallway loop, the camera pans around to show who they'd been in control of, and that that character was played by Norman Reedus. All the while, text flashes on screen revealing the game was being made by Kojima and del Toro. It ends with a fade to the name "Silent Hills" while the theme song from the series plays.
Once the cat was out of the bag, there was no stopping fan excitement for P.T. At the time, and this is still true today, Kojima's name attached to anything was a huge deal. Especially in 2014, when The Phantom Pain was one of the most anticipated games of 2015. Del Toro and Reedus' attachment amplified this excitement, and the fact that the Silent Hill series was getting such a star-studded team to work on a new entry pushed everything over the edge. Just over two weeks after releasing the demo, Konami announced it'd been downloaded more than one million times.
Kojima has an almost hyperbolic way of talking about his upcoming games (see: Strand Game), and Silent Hills was certainly no different. He spoke broadly about his ambitions with a survival horror game and talked about how he wanted it to be the scariest game ever made. He wanted to make a game that didn't make players pee their pants, he said that after talking to del Toro he wanted to make a game that made players s--- their pants — even if that meant it was too scary for some players.
"So be it. We don't care," Kojima told Polygon in 2014. "We are aiming for a game that will make you s--- your pants. So please make sure you have a [change of clothes]." He even joked that the limited edition of Silent Hills would probably come with an extra pair of pants.
At the time, the reveal was surprising to the public, but Kojima's interest in making a new Silent Hill game and Konami's interest in allowing him to do that were a few years old by the time P.T. was released. Talking at the Eurogamer Expo in 2012, Kojima even said it was something he'd talked about with the president of Konami.
"In the past I've mentioned Silent Hill in interviews, and as a result of that the president of Konami rung me up and said he'd like me to make the next Silent Hill," Kojima said.
"Honestly, I'm kind of a scaredy-cat when it comes to horror movies, so I'm not confident I can do it. At the same time, there's a certain type of horror that only people who are scared of can create, so maybe it's something I can do.
"That said, I think Silent Hill has a certain atmosphere. I think it has to continue, and I'd love to help it continue, and if I can help by supervising or lending the technology of the Fox Engine, then I'd love to participate in that respect."
The game would show up one more time at the 2014 Tokyo Game Show, this time with a proper trailer, and by the end of the year Silent Hills was showing up on Most Anticipated games lists. P.T. even won a few awards, like Giant Bomb's Best Horror Game of 2014 and Polygon's 10th best Game of the Year.
The success and anticipation couldn't stop the behind-the-scenes drama unfolding at Konami, though. And Silent Hills, whatever it was or wasn't, was about to be nothing at all.
Creating A Panic
What was Silent Hills exactly? Realistically, probably some concepts and grand ideas. Not to say it wasn't actively being worked on in some capacity, but at the time Kojima Productions was heads down on The Phantom Pain, which was released in September 2015. There's nothing to indicate that the game was very far in development at all, or even playable beyond P.T. However, there were apparently lots of ideas.