Playable horror teaser P.T. isn’t backwards compatible on PS5, even if you try to transfer it directly from an existing PS4, and it’s not clear why.
Load up the library of games associated with your PlayStation Network account on the next-gen console, as Kotaku Editor-in-Chief Stephen Totilo did, and P.T. will have an icon with a slash through it saying it’s not available to download. A message saying “playable on PS4″ will instead direct you to go back to playing it on the old hardware.
But Polygon’s Michael McWhertor reports that it was possible to play P.T. on PS5 at one point by transferring it over directly from a PS4 it was stored on:
P.T. was the first PS4 title I tested through backward compatibility on PS5. On Oct. 24, I transferred my copy of P.T. to and played the game on my PS5, picking up from a recent save that carried over from PS4. Then I restarted P.T. from the beginning, and played through a bit more. It seemed to work fine.
After trying again this week, McWhertor wrote that it was no longer possible to manually transfer P.T. to a PS5.
The beloved proof-of-concept demo for Kojima Production’s cancelled Silent Hill project was pulled from PSN back in 2015. Even people who had already installed it once before weren’t able re-download it. This was back during Konami’s protracted separation from veteran Metal Gear developer Hideo Kojima, and whatever its reasons, the act of scrubbing P.T. from PSN seemed to make it clear the publisher didn’t want any more people to play the demo.
Back in October, Konami confirmed to GamesRadar that P.T. would not be downloadable from the PlayStation Store on PS5, but left open the possibility that players who already had it installed on their PS4s might be able to transfer it over themselves. It seems that ultimately Konami decided against allowing even that.
Sony told Polygon that no longer making P.T. backwards compatible on PS5 was “a publisher decision.”
P.T. remains a fascinating work of video game art in its own right, and it’s a shame that it will now be that much harder for players to preserve its legacy. It’s also a fascinating artefact, not just from a highly anticipated but ultimately cancelled project, but from one of the messier chapters in Konami’s history (for those who may have forgotten, the publisher reportedly banned Kojima from attending the 2015 Game Awards where Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain was up for consideration for Game of the Year).
Konami did not immediately respond to a request by Kotaku for comment.
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