The teenage developer behind the revival of the Silent Hills demo said Konami was very nice and complimentary of the work — even offering an internship. But it has to be taken down.
The fan remake of P. T. — the 2014 demo/“playable teaser” of Silent Hills, notoriously canceled before Hideo Kojima’s split from Konami — has been kiboshed.
The 17-year-old developer behind the project, who goes by the handle Qimsar, said Konami made contact this week and that he was told to cease, as well as desist. You know the drill. However, says Qimsar, the Konami representative was very cool about it, not personally threatening, and complimented the work. Moreover, he says, Konami has offered him an internship. But the P. T. remake has gotta go.
Before it got yanked, this is what the gameplay (from the beginning of July) looked like:
Qimsar, in a GameJolt blog post about P. T. for the PC and its takedown, said version 0.9.5 of the remake was about to launch (this coming Sunday) and work on all of the animations had just wrapped up — meaning they were 100 percent true to the original P. T., not simply playable.
Qimsar estimated the work put into the P. T. remake at around 180 hours. Qimsar said he felt like “a giant burden… has been lifted off my shoulders” since agreeing to take down the game, though.
P. T. launched on PlayStation 4 in August 2014, and fans of both the Silent Hill series and Kojima’s work raved about it; director Guillermo del Toro was also on board to direct the upcoming Silent Hills game. Actor Norman Reedus, who is now teaming with those two for the forthcoming Death Stranding, was also aboard.
But Konami abruptly shut everything down in the spring of 2015. A month later, P. T. was purged from the PlayStation Store — meaning even those who acquired it could no longer re-download it. The following September, Kojima left the publisher, where he’d worked since 1986, to start a new studio.
