Last August, Sony pulled off a pretty exciting video game announcement in the form of P.T., an unassuming demo that was released to the PlayStation Store with very little fanfare. As far as anyone could tell, P.T. was just a horror game where you explore a spooky house, but as more and more people were able to complete it, word began to spread that there was a lot more to P.T. than anyone had realized. At the end of the demo, the game revealed that it was actually a stealth preview for a Silent Hill reboot starring a digitized version of Norman Reedus, and it was being developed by Hideo Kojima (the creator of Metal Gear Solid) and Guillermo del Toro.
The game was called Silent Hills, and we didn’t hear much about it after that. It’s not unusual for games to get announced and then fade away for a while, so nothing seemed out of the ordinary at the time. Then, Konami (the studio that publishes the Silent Hill and Metal Gear games) essentially scrubbed the existence of Hideo Kojima from its website, which led many to believe that he and the company had parted ways—and with only months before Metal Gear Solid V is supposed to be released. Konami eventually put out a statement saying, basically, that everything was fine and nobody had mysteriously quit/been fired, but it wasn’t exactly reassuring to the fans who were left wondering about the status of one of the most iconic game developers in the world.
Now, unfortunately, we at least seem to know the status of Silent Hills. As reported by Kotaku, an audience member asked Guillermo del Toro about Silent Hills at a recent event in San Francisco, and he responded that “it’s not gonna happen.”
Later, Norman Reedus, the would-be star of Silent Hills, also seemed to confirm that the project was dead, tweeting that he’s “super bummed” and was “really looking forward to it.”
This all seems to come back around to Hideo Kojima’s mysterious exit from Konami—if that’s what’s happening—but it doesn’t sound like anyone involved is ready to give up the real details anytime soon. Plus, just to make everything worse for people who were really looking forward to Silent Hills, Konami has announced that it will be removing the P.T. demo from the PlayStation store next week. In other words, download it now or you might never get to play it.