The Truth About The Creepiest Game Ever Made

Years after Konami put a stake in the heart of Silent Hills, intrepid players have been examining the beautiful corpse of P.T., the game's "playable teaser." They're still finding hidden mysteries that deserve to live on. These are just a few of the most intriguing — and disturbing — things they've found.

It seems so long ago now, but it's worth remembering just how many gymnastics Hideo Kojima and company went through to obscure virtually everything we now know about P.T., even going so far as to intentionally cap its frame rate at 30FPS — just to give off the vibe of an indie walking simulator.

And yet, it wasn't until after the teaser came out that it became clear just how much was hiding in plain sight. It all starts with the fake name of the studio that supposedly developed the demo: 7780s. As it turns out, the biggest clue was right there, just obscured in that typical Kojima way.

See, as Kojima himself later explained, "7780s" actually corresponds to the exact measurement in square kilometers of a prefecture in Japan called Shizuoka. Nothing's terribly special about Shizuoka, per se. Well, nothing special except for the tiny fact that the very literal translation of the prefecture's name is "quiet" or "silent hill." It's the kind of coded reference that you can just imagine Kojima cooking up at a desk, cackling with glee, waiting for somebody to figure it out.

"What took you so long?" On the flipside, even though he tried to obscure P.T.'s AAA pedigree as much as possible in the actual playing of the game, there is one special moment where Kojima secretly let the Fox Engine off the chain: the actual Silent Hills teaser at the very end.

In that moment, the final teaser is dazzling with its beautifully rendered cars, buildings, and streetlights, and then, oh my god, it's Daryl Dixon! But the teaser could've so easily been just a high resolution pre-rendered video. In reality, though, the entire teaser at the end is executed completely in-engine, real time — and it's stunning.

Silent Hills was already kind of a dream collaboration between the man responsible for Metal Gear Solid and the man who made Pan's Labyrinth. But, there was one other name that would've made this game a horrorphile hat trick. As it turns out, during the planning stages for the game, Kojima and Guillermo del Toro approached infamous horror manga creator Junji Ito about coming aboard.

In case you're scratching your head, wondering why this dude's name sounds so familiar, it might be because he's the mastermind behind the spine-tingling short, "The Enigma of Amigara Fault." And the weird, geometric hell that is Uzumaki — fun fact: That manga got turned into an equally freaky movie.

Anyway, the partnership didn't get terribly far thanks to the whole shebang getting canceled. If you consider the very architecture of the endless loop in P.T., it's a game designed around a perpetual downward spiral, which, uh, Ito might know one or two things about.

P.T. is already absolutely terrifying just the way it is, and it's terrifying while having exactly two things that would qualify as traditional monsters: the toothy ghoul Lisa and the screaming fetus you're locked in the bathroom with early on. Luckily for everybody, we didn't find ourselves dealing with a third spookster — because we almost did, and it would've ruined the pants of the world.

Some time after the game was delisted, data miners managed to look into P.T.'s asset files, and found a full character model for a distended female monster with one leg. That doesn't sound all that scary on its own, until you watch the Tokyo Game Show trailer for Silent Hills that released a month after P.T.

And realize that thing was meant to come stretching for you down a hallway, taking up the entire space. Again, your pants should be thankful. One of the most intriguing discoveries is just straight up "the call is coming from inside the house"-level horror, and it has to do with the game's sound and lighting, which always made it seem like a noise was coming from right next to you and the shadows didn't necessarily match you.

Well, a Twitter user named Lance McDonald managed to find out why. Using some debug magic, McDonald separated P.T.'s camera from the character, allowing him to move around the space without the camera following. What he found out was that the game's main antagonist, the grinning revenant of Lisa, is literally behind you every step of the way, attached to the player's back, though the distance may vary.