The former Konami staff member responsible for putting up and taking down P.T. – the free teaser for the later cancelled Silent Hills – from storefronts has talked about the process of removing the game eight years after the fact.
The first party lead for Konami at the time was Pearl Lai, and she put together a thread and answered questions on Twitter about the process of setting up P.T. on the PlayStation storefront, and eventually taking it down.
“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,” wrote Lai. “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,” (via VGC).
Lai no longer works at Konami, so took the time to answer some extra questions about how the takedown went. When asked if it was awkward, she replied: “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.”
Fans were also asking for specific reasons as to why P.T. was removed in the first place, to which Lai replied: “I say this with love, because Konami.”
The eighth anniversary of P.T. being pulled from stores, alongside the cancellation of the game it teased, Silent Hills, has also seen some of the creatives behind it make statements. Director Guillermo del Toro tweeted out “F.K.” in response to a Hideo Kojima tweet – believed to mean “fuck Konami,” as he also tweeted out that exact statement in 2016.
Kojima then addressed how he thought it would take players around two months to complete P.T., but that it in fact took only two days, to which he said he felt a “sense of failure.”
In other news, Nintendo says it won’t be increasing the price of the Nintendo Switch, despite the rising manufacturing costs.
