P.T. - A Video Game Ghost Story

In August of 2014, a demo innocently appeared on the PlayStation Store. It had a spooky old tombstone with P.T. painted on it, sitting silently in a wooded area. Playing this demo would take players to a rather ordinary hallway, one that would lead to one of the most terrifying horror games ever made.

And now you can't get it any more.

Even just as a short demo, P.T. created a powerful atmosphere of terror, dragging the player into its ordinary environments and steadily filling them with dread. Through its steady erosion of reality, striking visuals, cryptic completion criteria, and the chilling ghost, Lisa, it creates a fear that can sicken in its intensity, leaving players begging for the ghost to just appear and end it all.

It was to show what Hideo Kojima, the man behind Metal Gear, could do with horror and the Silent Hill series. It was to set a new bar for horror. Then, not even a year later, it was gone, pulled from the store for nebulous reasons as relations between its creator and Konami broke down.

P.T.: A Video Game Ghost Story is an unofficial investigation into the strange history behind this lost horror game, how players came to solve its complex puzzles, and what makes it so effective at scaring its players. Featuring interviews with the first player to complete it, the Let's Players who broke its mysteries, P.T. speedrunners, video game historians, and Konami staff, it looks to shine a light on what made the experience so compelling, why we subject ourselves to these horrors, and what will happen as this fearful experience fades from memory to become its own real-world ghost story.