The interactive teaser for the cancelled horror game Silent Hills, PT, continues to excite players’ minds even 10 years after its release. Modder and data miner Lance McDonald recently made a discovery in the project that amazed him.
Image source: Konami
Let us recall that in PT the player is haunted by the ghost of a pregnant woman, Lisa, who was killed by her own husband. McDonald in the past showedthat her spirit literally follows the user on his heels.
In an attempt to make Lisa appear at “arbitrary XYZ coordinates,” McDonald revealed a complete list of all possible ghost materialization points, as well as the game logic that determines the specific location for this.
Image source: X (Lance McDonald)
As it turns out, Lisa’s spawn location throughout PT is entirely determined by detailed, hard-coded instructions: “No scripting language is used for this at all. Insanity.”
The Fox Engine, on which PT is based, supports high-level programming languages, but in Lisa’s case they are not used: the authors limited themselves to C++. “It looks almost intentionally confusing,” the modder says.
The moment Lisa teleported that scared McDonald “to hell”
In conversation with GamesRadar McDonald explained that game design is typically separated from the engineering side of a game, making it surprising to see gameplay elements “hard-coded at the lowest level of the engine.”
PT is approaching its 10th anniversary – an interactive teaser was released on August 12, 2014 on PS4. Following the cancellation of Silent Hills, the demo was pulled from the PS Store. The “sample” can no longer be downloaded, and it is incompatible with the PS5, although McDonald managed the impossible.
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