On August 12, 2014, PT appeared on the PlayStation Store. The previously unknown 7780s Studio was the developer behind the first-person horror game. Within a few hours, a movement behind the game formed.
In the run-up to Gamescom 2014 on August 12, 2014, during Sony’s PlayStation conference, which was still taking place at the time as a prelude to the trade fair, Hideo Kojima made an appearance on behalf of Konami. So far, so unspectacular. After all, the aim was to promote Metal Gear Solid 5, which was then in development, with a new trailer.
But right after the Metal Gear presentation, there was a big surprise: a horror game in development called PT was shown, developed by a previously completely unknown studio called 7780s Studio. And it looked good – and damn scary. And not only that, it was available as a download exclusively for PlayStation 4 owners right after the presentation. Wow!
Conspiracy theories quickly arose, claiming that the timing of the game’s appearance was no coincidence. So the Metal Gear inventor is now working in the horror genre? Nonsense! Although he was known for bizarre announcement stunts, the good man…
To make it short: In this case, the conspiracy theory turned out to be 100 percent correct. Because, as gamers are, they are capable of absolutely herculean feats as a collective. Just a few hours after the first PS4 owners downloaded PT, all of the puzzles and secrets in the game, some of them extremely obscure, had already been solved – and a trailer that was shown as a reward for completing the game revealed the secret:
PT, which simply means Playable Teaser, was the next main part of Konami’s Silent Hill horror series, and the real name of the game was Silent Hills! And yes, it was developed by Kojima Productions. The game was to be created in collaboration with director Guillermo del Toro (known for Pan’s Labyrinth) and would feature The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus as the main character, as was also revealed in the trailer after the teaser was over.
Konami and Kojima Productions pulled off a real PR coup with the release of PT and the unveiling of Silent Hills (buy now), the next installment in the legendary survival horror series. Incidentally, it turned out a little differently than Kojima had imagined:
The puzzles he and his team had come up with were so obscure that he expected it to take several days to solve all the tasks and reveal the game’s true identity. But he hadn’t counted on the combined power of the Internet!
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Silent Hills: PT horror demo for PS4 in video
Just weeks after Gamescom, Hideo Kojima confirmed that PT had already been downloaded over a million times, a sure-fire hit and a potential horror masterpiece seemed to be on the horizon. During the Tokyo Games Show in September 2014, another trailer for Silent Hills was shown, this time without any attempt to fool people, but once again extremely atmospheric and terrifying in the best sense of the word.
And then… well, what happened after that? Then came the great radio silence. The probably most anticipated horror game in gaming history seemed to disappear completely. What nobody knew at the time: Neither PT nor Silent Hills would ever come onto the market. A dispute arose between Hideo Kojima and Konami and thus a messy split. At the end of April 2015, PT was removed from the PlayStation Store.
The shocking news that confirmed all the bad premonitions came in April 2015: Silent Hills was dead, the project was officially canceled. As a result, Konami lost a lot of its reputation in the community. Hideo Kojima, on the other hand, had his last day at Konami on December 15, 2015 and then did his own thing – like the action adventure Death Stranding, released in 2019.
The rift between Kojima and Konami is so complex and multifaceted that you could fill entire articles with it. Ultimately, however, it was primarily about the company’s reorientation and the creative vision behind it. But that’s not the topic here. Instead, we want to explore why PT was so influential, even though it was just a playable teaser.
A different kind of horror
If PT has managed to do one thing as a demo of an upcoming game, it is this: to create anticipation and bring Silent Hill fans together. The game is full of secrets, clues and allusions. This starts with the name of the supposed developer studio: 7780s. 7780 is simply the size of the Shizuoka prefecture in square kilometers: Shizuka means “silent” and Oka means “hill”. If you say both quickly one after the other, you get “Shizuoka” and thus Silent Hill. The “s” at the end of the puzzle finally gives the full title.
Source: Konami This form of secrecy runs through the entire horror demo. Above all, PT throws us completely unsuspecting into the classic scenario of the spooky haunted house, but with a twist. If you don’t know the game, you should watch a walkthrough on YouTube to really understand the premise.
The game design of the game itself is bold and minimalist. PT is almost a chamber game combined with a walking simulator. It mainly takes place in an L-shaped corridor that we walk through from a first-person perspective. We start our adventure at the first door and make our way through the corridor.
The special thing: No matter where we are, we always look into a hallway. Anyone who has ever stood in a strange, dark hallway in the dark knows how scary it can be. At the same time, a feeling of confinement and defenselessness arises. If you then go through the door at the end, you are back where you started, because the game runs in a seemingly endless loop. The result: disorientation and thus increased insecurity.
Source: Konami The lack of gameplay patterns also plays a role in the experience. The scenery changes seemingly randomly and at random. Most players don’t notice at first that these changes are accompanied by uncovering clues and exploring the environment. The radio reports about a murder case and the gloomy atmosphere are too distracting. As I said, it’s almost a miracle how quickly the game was “cracked” after the announcement!
But the longer you play, the more obvious it becomes that you are not alone in the building. A ghost is causing trouble – and is watching you from the balcony, for example. However, the figure named “Lisa” is hiding so well in the darkness that you have to look very closely.
As Victor Eisenmann notes in his analysis of PT, PT also keeps the gameplay simple and thus plays into the hands of virtual horror. Because you can actually do (almost) nothing. The nameless main character can examine objects and try to open doors. There is also a zoom function to look at objects more closely.
There are no weapons, no way to escape or hide. So we are helplessly exposed to the horror and have to endure what the game serves us. For example, we repeatedly hear a baby crying and try to localize the sounds.
Only later do we discover a deformed, screaming fetus in the bathroom. We cannot run away and instead try to connect what happened with the news on the radio and the information we have gathered. Only when we have solved the last puzzles does the trailer or rather the credits finally flicker across the screen, showing the main character from a third-person perspective and revealing Norman Reedus as the actor.
