I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: No game that actually exists can ever measure up to the games that got killed before they were released. Prey 2? Fallout Van Buren? Neither came out, so they get to exist in the realm of imagination forever, perfect and beautiful.
The most recent king of the genre is, I reckon, PT—Hideo Kojima’s playable teaser (get it?) for the now-cancelled Silent Hills, made in collaboration with Guillermo del Toro. Konami has effectively obliterated all trace of the game from existence, but that doesn’t mean people don’t reflect wistfully on what could have been.
People like, for instance, Bayonetta director Hideki Kamiya (via IGN), who recently returned to one of his year-old threads on X to throw down the gauntlet over the game (kind of, in a very polite interpretation of throwing down a gauntlet). Per IGN’s translation of the original Japanese, Kamiya wrote, “If it’s impossible to resurrect PT, Kojima should make a new game in the same style… If Kojima doesn’t do it, maybe I’ll give it a go.”
A Kamiya-helmed PT sounds, well, kind of baffling. But baffling in a way I wouldn’t mind seeing. It would also be very different from Kojima’s effort: “I hate horror though, so it wouldn’t be horror… plus, I have no ideas.” Sounds like a winner. Someone cut this man a cheque.
Kamiya’s a well-documented PT fanatic, despite his professed dislike of horror. Indeed, the thread he returned to in order to make the challenge above was one in which he wrote that The Exit 8 ought to be regarded as a kind of “PT-like,” but that PT’s damnatio memoriae meant modern players didn’t quite make the connection.
“That’s how innovative PT was,” wrote Kamiya (translation by Automaton), “completely unique and without precedent, not to mention hugely influential on the developers who followed.” Who knows? Perhaps the upcoming Kojima-led horror game OD will fill the PT-shaped void in our lives and cultural memory?
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