Ah, P.T. – also known as the “the teaser for a game about ghosts that a lot people would want to play but will never ever be able to.” This 2014 phenomenon had hit millions of gamers worldwide since this was supposed to be Silent Hills, a Hideo Kojima game. It was supposed to be a new entry to the hit Konami franchise. It was supposed to feature Norman Reedus as the main character. Film director Guillermo Del Toro was supposed to collaborate with Kojima on this project. Legendary horror manga artist Ito Junji was supposed to do the design for the game’s myriad of monsters. Was. Supposed. To.
Now, a Simon Carless of StoryBundle has just curated a number of ebooks called The Retro Game Bundle. Inside this bundle is an exclusive piece of work called P.T.: A Video Game Ghost Story. Written by Indie Games Senior Editor Joel Couture, the book is about his P.T. investigations on what made the game captivate a lot of audience even though it was just a teaser.
My new study on P.T., the terrifying, Kojima-designed teaser to Silent Hills, is available now exclusively through @storybundle!https://t.co/PghMXbZAc7 pic.twitter.com/DtrbnkKulu
— Joel Couture (@Joel_Couture) April 12, 2018
For more information, here are Couture’s own words about the book, via StoryBundle:
Even just as a short demo, P.T. created a powerful atmosphere of terror, dragging the player into its ordinary environments and steadily filling them with dread. Through its steady erosion of reality, striking visuals, cryptic completion criteria, and the chilling ghost, Lisa, it creates a fear that can sicken in its intensity, leaving players begging for the ghost to just appear and end it all.
It was to show what Hideo Kojima, the man behind Metal Gear, could do with horror and the Silent Hill series. It was to set a new bar for horror. Then, not even a year later, it was gone, pulled from the store for nebulous reasons as relations between its creator and Konami broke down.
P.T.: A Video Game Ghost Story is an unofficial investigation into the strange history behind this lost horror game, how players came to solve its complex puzzles, and what makes it so effective at scaring its players. Featuring interviews with the first player to complete it, the Let’s Players who broke its mysteries, P.T. speedrunners, video game historians, and Konami staff, it looks to shine a light on what made the experience so compelling, why we subject ourselves to these horrors, and what will happen as this fearful experience fades from memory to become its own real-world ghost story.
Check out the bundle here.
[Source: Twitter]
