The Day Fear Changed: The Legacy Of P.T.

PT, the playable teaser for Silent Hills, is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, August 12, 2024. Below, we look back at how even as a demo, it impacted the survival horror genre.

Nobody thought much of a new horror title from an unknown studio called 7780, dropped in right as Hideo Kojima was finishing up on stage at Gamescom on August 12, 2014. Mostly, it was just cool they were introducing a game using a “playable teaser”–an idea that, by itself, does deserve to happen more often.Some hours later, it became clear August 12, 2014 was the day horror in video games would be changed for years to come.

On August 12, 2014, players who downloaded P.T. booted up the game and began their long walk to perdition, through a recursive hallway. The hallway was dusty and cluttered, but recognizably normal, aside from the radio broadcast describing the grisly murder-suicide of a father and his family. Walking through the door at the end of the L-shaped hallway brought them back to the beginning–over and over, but with small, unnerving changes. A bathroom door is cracked open, with a woman vaguely visible inside before it slams shut. The next time through, the bathroom is open, laying bare the bloody, screaming fetus in the sink. The next: A featureless woman stands in the hall before vanishing. The next: The radio broadcast tells you, yes you, to turn around.

Doing so puts the player face-to-disfigured-face with a woman named Lisa, who promptly murders you, only for you to wake up, yet again, in that hallway. The lights are now dimming. The squeak of the chandelier above replaces the radio broadcast. The pictures on the dresser are increasingly scratched and torn. Aside from the fetus, the horror was shockingly bloodless. And yet, it was terrifying gamers around the planet. P.T. wasn’t just a playable teaser; it was an interactive, self-contained nightmare, and unlike anything else in gaming at that point.

Despite its creators thinking it would take weeks for the world to figure out the final, obtuse puzzle and get to the surprise waiting at the end of P.T., within mere hours, players had beaten the demo, and the cat was out of the bag. P.T. was, indeed, a teaser for a new Silent Hill, with Norman Reedus cast as the new protagonist, directed by Hideo Kojima, working hand-in-hand with Guillermo Del Toro (with Junji Ito giving an assist, something we wouldn’t learn till much later). The rest of the story is the stuff of legend now. It was a dream project, and the dream was dead a year later, when Kojima was fired from Konami under a cloud of internal drama.

Kojima would get started on Death Stranding with Reedus (with new friend Del Toro lending his visage for the cast as well). Aside from the occasional pachinko machine, Konami would sit Smaug-style on the Silent Hill license until announcing a slew of new games in 2023: two of which have already released to poor reception, and another being a controversial Silent Hill 2 remake coming in October 2024. Meanwhile, Konami all but gave P.T. the full Ark of the Covenant treatment, pulling it from the PlayStation Store after Kojima’s firing, removing the ability to even redownload it, and deliberately locking it from even being played on the PlayStation 5. We were robbed of one of the most promising horror projects in gaming history. P.T. is now its only enduring remnant–a mere demo, and it’s technologically imprisoned on the PS4. But something terrible and wonderful has occurred in the decade since. Survival-horror had grown stagnant by 2014. With only a few notable exceptions–the Amnesia games, in particular–it was marked by a never-ending parade of cheap jump-scares and mindless gore, punctuated occasionally by a few excellent dramatic pieces using horror as a launchpad for other ideas, e.g. The Last of Us and Telltale’s Walking Dead. After 2014, the landscape would start developing an undercurrent. Fear looked and felt different. Horror in every moving medium has always leaned on disgust and surprise to be effective. After P.T., game developers learned a word rarely employed with any degree of effectiveness prior: dread.

Compared to the surprise of a creature jumping out at you from the shadows, or all the varying ways a human being could be vivisected without players growing numb to the experience, dread is one of those emotions that games didn’t lean on if they wanted to sell to a mass audience. It’s not cinematic or flashy, it’s difficult to convey in a trailer, and it requires time and patience that the vast majority of games teach players not to have. Suddenly, Hideo Kojima put that approach back in play on a grand scale. There were no musical stings. None of its horrors were telegraphed. There was simply the pervasive, inescapable knowledge that something here is wrong, and you are powerless to do anything but move forward.

Junji Ito’s involvement was the ace here. His best horror stories all feed on the idea of people compelled by unknowable forces into grotesque acts of human desecration. With only one way forward in P.T., once players stepped into the hallway, they belonged to the hallway. No UI. No life system. No narrators. No voiceovers. None of the safety rails to remind players they’re just playing a game. This is your hole. And in the years that followed, others would be emboldened to follow Kojima’s lead.

It started almost immediately after Konami had P.T. stricken from the PlayStation Store. Multiple projects sprang up, eager to recreate P.T. on PC, from respectable “inspired by”s like Lilith Ltd’s Allison Road and SadSquare’s Visage, to just direct recreations of the game like Unreal P.T. It was an act of artistic reverence that doubled, whether consciously or not, as an act of preservation. Recreation shortly gave way to elaboration, or at least a solemn attempt at it. The first to get major attention, 2016’s Layers of Fear, owed its mood and presentation to P.T., but went in its own direction with its story about a painter going insane in his own home while trying to paint his masterpiece.

While it had its share of mechanical imperfections, and was clumsy in how it explored its themes–a problem that’s only gotten worse for Bloober in subsequent titles– it was at least thinking differently than its contemporaries. It was, at minimum, a story about a failing marriage, through indirect, distressing terms. Its developer got enough right where the particular solitary mood and tone became their bread and butter, aping and elaborating on it to the point that in 2024, Konami put them in charge of the Silent Hill 2 remake, a decision that… well, we’ll get back to that.

Ironically, maybe the most successful of P.T.’s ideological progeny is 2017’s Resident Evil 7. After that series hit a dead end of ideas with the ridiculous cartoon that was Resident Evil 6, they stripped the series down. It’s the survival-horror equivalent of Taylor Swift’s Folklore. Without its high-concept military fetishes to lean on, Resident Evil found itself leaning into its name a little more. Players were trapped in a house in Middle of Nowhere, Louisiana. It was a place of crumbling walls, rotting food, and dead bodies. Its inhabitants were a hostile, homicidal family empowered into eternal domestic abuse by the fact that they can no longer die.

Even when it engaged in its sillier moments–looking at you, chainsaw fight–there’s a very adult mean streak to it all. Resident Evil found the will to delve into its dark heart, delivering one of the most-frightening experiences in recent memory. While its producer states RE7 was on its path before P.T. released, it’s clear they were emboldened by its very existence. This was the right track, and while Village scaled things back somewhat amidst complaints that RE7 was actually too frightening, even that game found ways to keep the spirit alive; specifically, in the absolutely terrifying House Beneviento section.

This is all to say nothing of a slew of indie titles more than willing to eschew easy scares for unmooring the audience from reality, but not their emotions–a hallowed, elevated level of a horror encompassing everything from Red Candle’s heartbreaking but terrifying Detention to the abstract technological nightmare of Rose-Engine’s Signalis. Games had been playing this particular mode before. P.T.’s release gave those ideas license to kill. There is a hard question to ask, though: Would P.T. have had such an impact if Silent Hills actually happened? One of the unspoken things driving the boom of horror games is absolutely the fact that Konami never replaced Silent Hill with anything. While they were quick to try and squeeze a buck out of Metal Gear after Kojima was gone, Silent Hill only existed as a pachinko machine in P.T.’s wake.

Unlike so many canceled projects, we actually got a taste of what the promised land could’ve been, and so much of the horror boom was in mourning and questioning an unfinished symphony. The closest analogue would be Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed adaptation of Dune inevitably inspiring the Lynch and Villeneuve iterations. What if that version of Dune came to fruition, as weird and ahead of its time as it was? Do we get Lynch’s messier version–and does either version go on to influence generations of creators in the same way?

It’s hard to even think about the game Silent Hills could’ve been, in the same way it’s hard to even think about Half-Life 3. Enough time has passed where the game in our heads is likely better than what would’ve gotten made, even with the pedigree it had. The Konami that would’ve delivered Silent Hills is the Konami that also allowed the series to sit dormant, and is currently the one letting Silent Hill 2 be remade, but by a studio that frequently can’t handle adult themes with the white gloves they deserve. Silent Hills, very possibly, could have been imprisoned in a very different way. As it stands now, P.T.’s black, unfathomable spirit roams free.

P.T. has haunted the horror genre in games for a decade. It’s a creative black hole that hopes and dreams went into, and spat out radioactive evil, in search of a glory we will never experience, for better and for worse. That search, that need to hit those heights again, has led to a creative vacuum unlike anything else in media. A successful film or album–whether that success was creative or financial–will see imitators eager to cash in while its ideas are profitable. Those imitating or iterating on P.T. are caretakers of ideas that only ever existed for a year.