Eight years after the Silent Hills demo first released, the person responsible for taking PT down from the PSN store discusses what happened.
We all dearly wish we could have seen Hideo Kojima’s take on Silent Hill (and obviously so does he), but unfortunately we likely never will, outside of any footage of PT that’s currently online. PT was an incredibly promising demo, and now due to its cancellation isn’t even downloadable for those that owned it at any point in time. And now the very person who had it taken down from the PSN has spoken about the situation.
At the time of PT’s release, Pearl L. was Konami’s first-party lead, and took to Twitter to talk pretty openly about some behind the scenes events regarding PT, though has since made their account private.
“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,” tweeted Pearl L (thanks VGC). “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.”
Pearl responded to a commenter asking if the situation was “awkward,” saying “Awkward is right! We’d already gone through a lot to get it set up, got a lot of operational exceptions. And then to add the request to block redownload? More engineering workarounds. It was exciting to see people hype about it and see the work pay off! But in a way also not.”
Part of the initial mystery surrounding PT was that it was supposedly developed by a studio called 7780s Studio, a pseudonym setup to hide the fact it was actually a new Silent Hill game.
The whole situation was incredibly messy, and obviously led to Kojima’s departure from Konami to form his own studio, the unsubtley named Kojima Productions. At least Kojima got his wish to put Norman Reedus in a game.