I thought it had been rather quiet round these parts lately. It turns out it’s been several months since Bayonetta and Devil May Cry creator Hideki Kamiya had a tantrum about anything on social media. What are you steamed up about today, Kamiya-san? Ah, of course, Hideo Kojima. Specifically, Kojima’s long-lost horror game P.T. – a collaboration with movie-maker Guillermo del Toro which Konami banished from PlayStation Network in 2015, after cancelling Kojima’s associated Silent Hills project.
That P.T. is one of the finest horror games ever made and also, no longer officially available online is one of the better arguments for the wholesale nuking of the games industry. Seriously, if this is how you’re going to behave, Konami, let’s tear it all down and put the cockroaches in charge. Norman Reedus wept like a seal the night you deleted the storepage. Fortunately, he’s found other work since.
How does Kamiya propose to set the world to rights? By making his own new version of P.T., except that his version wouldn’t be a horror game, because Kamiya hates horror, even though he directed the original Resident Evil 2. Erm.
One inclines to suspect that this Hideki Kamiya man may not be entirely serious in the things that he says on yonder TwiX. Here’s the full quote, anyway, as translated and passed along by IGN. “[I]f it’s impossible to resurrect P.T., Kojima should make a new game in the same style,” Kamiya wrote, adding: “if Kojima doesn’t do it, maybe I’ll give it a go. I hate horror though, so it wouldn’t be horror… plus, I have no ideas.”
I’m propagating Kamiya’s bullshit because it’s an excuse to start a comments thread discussion about P.T. If you never played it, allow me to sum it up the same way I summed it up to some party guests back in 2014, after they had the insolence to defeat me at Scrabble: there is an L-shaped corridor, and all you have to do is exit through the other end. My guests left that night white-faced and falsetto, shortly after getting the initial radio puzzle wrong. That’ll learn the bastards to pop a cheeky “Quoth” on a triple-word tile.
P.T. may be long gone, and also, never actually released on PC, but it has spawned many imitators. There are the fullscale fan clones knocked together in the Half-Life: Alyx engine and, uh, Hypercard, and also, chilly apartment tours like Devotion that apply something of the same claustrophobia.
Swivelling back to Kamiya in closing, the absolute best thing that can come of all this foolery is for Kojima to respond to Kamiya on Twitter, so that Kamiya can block him immediately. Kamiya does so love doing that.
Further reading: Philippa Warr’s (RPS in peace) very old ruminations about trying to get into horror. Fortunately for Pip, Alice O (also RPS in peace) found a cute version of P.T. in 2019.
