Eight years after its release, the person who claims to have been tasked with pulling Konami’s P.T. from PlayStation servers have spoken about the experience for the first time.
P.T. was a critically acclaimed playable teaser for Hideo Kojima’s canceled Silent Hills game, which was released as part of a surprise drop during Gamescom 2014.
Released under the developer pseudonym ‘7780s Studio’, the fan-favorite game demo required the community of players to work together to solve the puzzles, revealing its true purpose as a teaser for Silent Hills by Kojima.
Death Stranding Director’s Cut Final Trailer
Death Stranding Director’s Cut Final Trailer
Ultimately, the Silent Hills project was canceled by Konami following Kojima’s departure from the company the following year. Controversially, P.T. was pulled from the PlayStation Store soon after, and even the ability to re-download it was blocked. See the article : The 10 must play 2022 video games so far. Years later it was rendered unplayable on PS5.
To this day, many dedicated fans have kept the game on their console hard drives, as the teaser is impossible to access in any other way.
After Kojima acknowledged the 8-year anniversary of P.T. on Twitter on Friday, former Konami employee Pearl L responded by claiming that she had both been responsible for setting up the surprise release of the game on the PlayStation Store, and also called in to have it removed.
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“Fun fact: being the [first-party] lead at the time at Konami, I helped get this product put up on storefronts, fake publishers and all,” she wrote. “And I was the one who had to call Sony and ask them to take it down and block downloads again. It was a very funny conversation.”
Pearl went on to answer many fan questions surrounding P.T.’s removal, although at the time of publication she has refused to give a clear answer as to exactly why it happened (when asked by a fan, she replied, “I say this with love, ‘because Konami’) .
However, Pearl made clear in her responses that it was “a tough situation” for those working at Konami, and reserved particular praise for the teams at Sony and Konami’s customer support staff.
“Sony was (as always) wonderful to work with. It was a tough situation all around,” she wrote.
“It was a RIDE! Honestly, [it wasn’t] a big situation all around – I really felt for Sony who had to bear the burden of dealing with the situation.” She later added, “It was definitely an interesting lesson in power and the importance of picking your battles in relationship management.”
Employees claimed that Konami’s support staff took much of the brunt of disgruntled fans. “They were already having a rough time as it was (there’s a reason they have ‘working names’ when sending calls), this didn’t make things better,” she wrote.
Asked by a fan to ask Sony to remove P.T. was awkward, Pearl replied: “Awkward is right! We had already gone through a lot to get it set up, got a lot of operational exceptions. And then add the request to block the download again? More technical solutions. It was exciting to see people’s hype about it and seeing the work pay off! But in a way, neither.”
According to staff, P.T. was the first time Sony had ever been asked to remove and block re-downloads of a video game on its digital store.
“Believe me, I wish it had gone differently too,” she replied to one fan. “It was definitely a lot of fun planning this secret cool thing for the fans. It was amazing to see everyone come together to try and figure out the experience and seem like they came away with so much love for it! I’m so thankful that I got to be a part of it in a small way.”
