For over a decade now, the only “official” way to play Hideo Kojima’s cult classic, P.T.—the long-discontinued “playable trailer” for Kojima’s canceled “Silent Hills” project—has beendownloaded a copy during its monthslong availability window. Now, though, one coder is helping to preserve the game with a porting tool that builds a playable x86 PC executable from the original PS4 files
Coder Lorean Xavier said he was inspired to work on the “P.T. for PC” project “because P.T. deserved to keep existing somewhere other than on consoles that still have it installed.” The open source porting effort rebuilds the P.T. engine in C++ and Vulkan, using the original files from the PS4 game to re-create “every level, model, texture, sound, script and cutscene,” according to its GitHub listing. That means players without their own legitimate decrypted copy of the original P.T. will have to track one down in order to generate a playable PC version.
The reliance on real P.T. files makes this port more authentic than previous hobbyist efforts to re-create the look and feel of P.T. for a PC audience. And while PS4 emulators recently reached a point where they could run P.T. completely, this native port also sports extra features, like upscaling and frame-generation, a camera mode, experimental third-person and VR support, and a “museum” section where you can look at and listen to in-game assets (including “unused content”).
Although Xavier admits to using AI tools in developing this port, it doesn’t seem like he simply followed the recent retro-gaming trend of asking a coding agent to decompile the game. On social media, Xavier said that he has “spent years studying P.T. and Fox Engine” in developing the port and only uses AI tools “for debugging, troubleshooting and investigating problems.”
“I’m a solo developer making a free P.T. port because I love the game,” he added. “Nobody hired me or asked me to spend countless hours on this. I’m sharing something I worked incredibly hard on, simply because I want other people to enjoy it.”
Beyond being of interest to curious gamers who never had access to the extremely limited PS4 version, this port of P.T. should be very useful to preservationists who want to maintain public access to this historically significant game for generations going forward. “Personally… I think the hardware super-specific solutions are dead ends for preservation,” Henry Lowood, curator for the History of Science & Technology Collections and Film & Media Collections in the Stanford University Libraries, told Ars back in 2015. “The kinds of equipment/hardware we have, the way they’re manufactured, just have a very small likelihood of surviving for super long periods of time.”
Kyle OrlandSenior Gaming Editor
Kyle OrlandSenior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
