8 Years Later, We Learn More About P.T.’s Delisting [Update]

8 Years Later, We Learn More About P.T.’s Delisting [Update]

Update: August 16th, 2022, 12:00 p.m. 

Pearl has gotten in touch with us here at Kotaku Australia to clarify that our speculation on the reasoning behind P.T.’s delisting and the previous headline does not reflect her words on the situation. The article and headline have been re-adjusted to reflect this, and apologise that our coverage resulted in a lost-in-translation type situation!

When chatting to Pearl, she explained, “A lot of people in games work really hard to deliver campaigns and experiences like this, everyone from management to people answering customer service calls or localizing the content. It really takes a village to pull things like this off! And because of this, my feeling for why P.T. went the way it did is the same explanation for how it was able to exist at all and why I say it with love: because Konami.”

We’d like to thank Pearl for reaching out to us and giving us further insight into the inner mechanisms of the industry, and further apologise for anything lost in translation with our initial report.

Original: August 15th, 2022, 3:30 p.m.

8 years after it cursed PlayStation 4 consoles around the world, the iconic Silent Hill demo P.T. gets a little more behind-the-scenes info, this time from the person made responsible for making the call to take it down.

It all started with our sweet boy Hideo Kojima posting an ode to the demo on his Twitter.

This resulted in Pearl L, an ex-staffer at Konami who has now gone private on Twitter, to quote tweet the ode with an interesting fun fact. While her being private on Twitter now means that the tweets are inaccessible, VGC‘s report managed to keep these tweets available.

“Fun fact: since I was the [first-party] lead at the time at Konami, I helped get this product set up on the storefronts, fake publisher and everything,” she wrote. “And I was the one who had to call Sony and ask them to take it down and block redownloads. That was a super fun conversation”.

This was then followed by Pearl answering many fan questions regarding just what the hell happened to P.T. She did answer one user asking about blocking redownloads with “I say this with love, ‘because Konami’.”

From where I see it, Silent Hill was cancelled due to Kojima’s split from Konami, so it could possibly be that the cancellation made Konami see little reason to keep the demo up.

Pearl then proceeded to explain what it was like working with Sony. “Sony (as always) was fantastic to work with. It was a tough situation all around,” she wrote, “It was a RIDE! Honestly, [it was] not a great situation all around – I really felt for Sony who had to bear the brunt of dealing with the situation.” She later added: “It was defo an interesting lesson in power and the importance of picking your battles in relationship management.”

According to Pearl, this was also the first time that Sony had been asked by a publisher to delist block redownloads of a demo available on their storefront. “Believe me, I wish it had gone differently too,” she responded to a fan. “It was definitely really fun to be plotting this secret cool thing for the fans. it was amazing to see everyone come together to try to figure out the experience and seem them come away with so much love for it! I’m super grateful I got to be a part of that in some small way.”

It’s always interesting hearing about how situations like this go down, especially from somebody directly involved in the process. It’s of course sad that something like this can happen, and that a simple demo that had such a huge impact on many people is now out of reach.

While there are, or were, all sorts of projects trying to capture the essence of P.T., I think it was both the demo itself as well as the knowledge of Kojima, Guillermo Del Toro, and Junji Ito all having a hand in its creation being something people truly wish they could’ve had. Gone and never forgotten, especially by those involved.


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