I don’t think I’ll ever really get over P.T.. Even over a decade later, it still clings at the back of my mind, occasionally clawing its way into the front when I roam around my house at night, eager to turn the hallway shadows into something more sinister.
And I’m not alone; whileP.T. received massive attention upon its inception, it still manages to live in the back of our collective subconscious, whether through modern games that are stylistically influenced by P.T., or through the fact that we’re still learning creepy stuff about the way it works, years later.
Let’s recap. In 2014, P.T. appeared in the PlayStation Store with no fanfare. It was supposedly worked on by a development studio called ‘7780 Studio’, which, if you Googled it, turned out to not exist. After downloading and booting it up, you’re loaded into an abandoned room with only one exit, which is cracked open slightly. When you exit the room, you’ll enter into the hallway of a deserted suburban house. As you move further in, you can hear a muffled voice on a radio describing a recent familicide. Walk through the hallway, past the front door, down some stairs, and through a door, and you’ll enter into another identical hallway. You can’t return back through the door you just closed.
This loop repeats infinitely, although, as you progress, things will start to change. Doors will shut seemingly of their own accord; writing appears on the walls while you aren’t looking, and any attempts to interact with the radio results in the voice pausing for a moment to warn you not to mess with the dial. Eventually, things will start dramatically escalating, but you’ll never be able to leave the hallway. And there’s seemingly no way to make the experience end – no solution to ‘win’ the game, so to speak.
Out of all horror media, this most fully encapsulates what I perceive to be the stuff of nightmares: shadowy, surrealistic, and you can never leave.
And let’s be clear here: I’m terrified of P.T., in a way that nothing else has ever made me feel, but I find it quite difficult to explain why. I’m usually able to recognise most horror fiction as, well, just that – fiction. I recognise that it can’t really hurt me, and, once the TV’s turned off, I’m able to go about my life without being terrified that Leatherface is going to come and hunt me down. But I just can’t say the same for P.T.; there’s just something different about its terror that genuinely gets under my skin. Even when I was prepping to write this article, I dreaded having to watch any of the gameplay footage.
Part of this, I think, comes from the familiarity of this game’s horror. Much of the horror game landscape is situated within more unrealistic scenarios; sure,Alien Isolation‘s terrifying, but the scenario of being trapped on a space station with a xenomorph hunting me down can’t really be applied to my real life, and so that game’s horror doesn’t really affect me as much.
Meanwhile, the house that P.T. is situated in looks relatively normal, and I’m sure that many players would easily be able to liken it to their own living situations. Many of us associate homes with a sense of comfort, and so, when the landscape starts to twist, the horror is all the more effective and potentially applicable to the real world. Now,whenever I hear anyone move around my own house at night time while I’m in my room, I can’t help but worry that it’s the P.T. ghost, despite knowing that it’s just my housemate up for a midnight snack.
In the face of all this fear, then, obsessively watching a billion YouTube videos on how P.T. works would make me a little less afraid of it, right? After all, learning how other games work on a technical level removes the appearance of reality to reveal that, all along, it wasjust a game.
Wrong.There’s a moment in P.T.where the voice on the radio stops, and says, “Look behind you”; if you do, there’s seemingly nothing there, which made me feel a little better in the knowledge that it was just messing with me. Years later, hackers learned that Lisa, the ghost that stalks you, is actually following behind you the whole time; the radio was right.
Meanwhile, players puzzled away at the game after its release, turning them into seemingly superstitious conspiracy theorists in pursuit of a seemingly unobtainable ‘win state’. So much of this puzzling, however, only served to make the game scarier in hindsight. Something that players eventually settled on is that, at one specific point, you need to speak in real life to your screen in order to progress; this came with the very sudden realisation that the game was listening to you, the player, the whole time.
Other external news about the game surfaced later, revealing that it was the result of a collaboration between Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, and was a sort of teaser (P.T. standing for ‘Playable Teaser’) for an upcomingSilent Hill game, and that it was permanently cancelled after Kojima’s mysterious firing from Konami. Following this cancellation, P.T. was permanently removed from the PlayStation Store, rendering it unobtainable if you hadn’t already downloaded it.
Putting aside the dubious morality of attempting to render something as a piece of lost media (no doubt related to Konami’s other tendencies of removing Kojima’s work from the public eye), it seems almost too appropriate that something as mysterious as P.T.was available for download for only a limited time, and we didn’t even know until it was too late. Combined with its mysterious origins, its removal heightens the game’s identity to almost that of an urban myth or legend, even in spite of how much we know about it now.
Of course, there are other ways we can look back on P.T.. Despite only really being a tone piece intended to instruct on the creation of a different game, it’s managed to have a massive impact upon the games industry, particularly some specific horror titles that released years later. The Resident Evil series’ seventh instalment has been positively compared to P.T., as it similarly takes place in a decrepit house and also features a first-person perspective that previous RE titles did not.RE8‘s focus on paternal fears, including a physical manifestation of them through a horrific deformed baby, can also be traced back to P.T., although I have no concrete evidence thatP.T. was a direct influence.
Other independent developers have outright stated that P.T. influenced their own games; the developers of Visage (2020), for example, named P.T. as a direct influence onVisage, its kickstarter page, describingP.T. as a “real-life horror simulator”.
Somehow, as we look back onP.T., its mystique is never removed; if anything, it’s only more potent. Despite just how much we know about it, and how much it’s influenced, returning back to it now is just as scary as it was a decade ago. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that I’m being followed. Maybe it’s knowing that the game will never be available for download again, rendering it spookily unobtainable. Possibly it’s my understanding of how many other scary titles it’s influenced – re-emerging, ghostlike, in the form of other games. Whatever it is, I just know that I’ll never be able to rinse the sounds and sights of P.T. out of my mind.
