One of the most controversial episodes to rock the video game industry in recent years has been the feud between Hideo Kojima and Konami, a long and turbulent series of bad blood and fan backlash of which the effect is still felt to this day. From the fallout of this clash of titans came one of the biggest “What If’s” of gaming history, the cancellation of Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro’s Silent Hills reboot, a grudge that gamers still hold to this day.
PT was a playable teaser for that very Silent Hills game, a critically-acclaimed and fan-beloved demo that was released on the PS4 August of 2014. The final knife in the back from Konami came when the company decided to pull the demo from the PlayStation Store, setting the Internet ablaze with anti-Konami rhetoric and outcry. A subsequent fan remake was also shot down by Konami, making consoles that still had the original demo downloaded even more valuable.
Today, a new fan project that had been in development for 9 months finally released, and has arguably improved on the original in every way. Dubbed Unreal PT, the project is a complete recreation of the original with optimized performance and VR support (albeit a bit unstable). According to developer RadiusGordello, the “textures, models, animations, and code have been remade from scratch.”
Over the course of nine months (April 2018 – January 2019), the developer painstakingly reconstructed the immaculate details found in the original game. Though the gameplay is nearly identical, RadiusGordello has noted that “the biggest difference is the very end of the game has been changed slightly to make beating it more consistent.”
It’s unclear if, or in this case when, Konami will take action against this new attempt at bringing back what is now a cult classic, but for those interested, the download and instructions can be found here. Unreal PT’s official website also contains RadiusGordello’s development log for the game.