A fan-made port of Hideo Kojima’s infamous horror game P.T, aka Playable Teaser, has been officially supported by the iconic game developer.
Originally released as a PlayStation exclusive in 2014, the game was removed from the PlayStation Store in 2015 as Konami and Kojima’s relationship broke down. The removal of the teaser also resulted in the cancellation of Silent Hills, a reboot of the iconic horror series that was helmed by Kojima, Guillermo Del Toro, and Junji Ito.
In the decade since, many fans have tried to recreate P.T or even make the game playable on PC via emulators. Some game studios have even created their own P.T. like games, but nothing has come close to the expert horror of the PS4 game demo.
In a huge surprise, a PC port of P.T was released by modder LoreanXavier earlier this week. The open-source port was created by monitoring how the horror game works within a PS4 emulator with AI-assisted debugging, but unlike many poor-quality PC recompilations, the new release works phenomenally well and brings some meaningful advancements to the game.
For example, as a native PC port, P.T can now be played entirely with a keyboard and mouse, and even supports multiple graphics presets for various PC rigs. There are options for low, medium, and original settings, as well as more advanced graphical features such as ray-traced shadows, reflections, and more. Various forms of upscaling are also available.
Alongside the improved visuals, the modder also added additional modes to the game. For example, players can now use a photo mode to explore every inch of the game’s environments, jump to any loop in the game with a loop selector, make use of a speedrun mode feature, and explore various assets in a museum mode.
The PC version of P.T also includes an experimental third-person mode as well as full VR support to play the world’s most terrifying game in the most terrifying way possible. If you want to create even more scares for the game, there’s also mod support so that anyone can add anything to P.T. (So, we’ll see CJ in the game very soon, right?)
While the game is a port to PC, players will have to provide their own game files to play it. We call this the recompilation legal loophole. As the port isn’t providing any of the game assets, it should be allowed to exist scot-free.
Response to the PC version of the game has been fantastic with P.T creator Hideo Kojima retweeting the port on both their English and Japanese language accounts. While Kojima hasn’t officially commented on the port, they have supported it’s existence. Guillermo Del Toro has also acknowledged the port’s existence.
“The GOAT himself acknowledged my port. I am speechless,” porter LoreanXavier said on Twitter upon seeing the game director’s interaction. “Seeing Kojima Hideo notice something I’ve poured so much time and passion into genuinely means the world to me. Thank you so much.”
Bringing P.T to modern platforms via recompilation is one of the strongest examples of why recompilation needs to exist, especially as the industry moves further towards digital only titles. As a game locked to a single platform in a digitally only state, there is no way to get P.T outside of buying an exorbitantly priced used PS4 that has the game installed.
Of course, the playable teaser should never have been removed from sale in the first place, but it was, and that’s the danger that digital-only marketplaces hold on games. One day, a beloved critically-acclaimed game will disappear, and we’ll have to hope that recompilation will be able to bring it back in some form.
