Over the past weekend, game creator Hideo Kojima celebrated the 8th anniversary of P.T., the playable teaser demo that would’ve led into the canned Silent Hills project. While the gaming industry still mourns the loss of what could’ve been, a former Konami employee has now spoken out about the difficulties of delisting P.T. and how they were given tough orders under the circumstances.
Konami’s former first-party lead Pearl L recently made her presence known after replying to Kojima’s tweet about P.T., revealing some interesting insight into what exactly happened during the cancellation and delisting of the demo on the PlayStation Store.
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For added context, P.T. was made by the fake developer “7780s Studio”, a clever ruse orchestrated by Kojima and Sony to mask P.T.‘s true identity as a teaser for Silent Hills, a project that would’ve seen Kojima collaborate with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, actor Norman Reedus and horror manga author Junji Ito. After Kojima’s fallout with Konami, the Japanese company quickly delisted P.T. from the PlayStation Store and removed any trace of it ever existing beyond those lucky enough to keep it stored on their consoles today.
Pearl L revealed herself as a former Konami employee who was responsible for delisting the game at the time and contacting PlayStation with the heavy task of asking them to take it down and block all redownloads.
“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,” she wrote. “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.”
She didn’t go into extreme detail about what happened at Konami, but replied to one fan saying, “I say this with love, ‘because Konami’)”.
However, she did provide insight into the talent working on the project and what a “tough situation” it was when it came time to delist P.T.:
“Sony (as always) was fantastic to work with. It was a tough situation all around.
It was a RIDE! Honestly, [it was] not a great situation all around – I really felt for Sony who had to bear the brunt of dealing with the situation. It was defo an interesting lesson in power and the importance of picking your battles in relationship management.”
As an added slight to Konami, del Toro replied to Kojima’s tweet with “F.K.” on Twitter. It’s easy to guess what that is.
Source: Video Games Chronicle
