Interactive teaser for the canceled horror film Silent Hills – P.T. — continues to excite the minds of players even 10 years after its release. Modder and dataminer Lance McDonald recently made a discovery that amazed him about the project.
Image source: Konami
Let us remind you that in P.T. The player is haunted by the ghost of a pregnant woman, Lisa, who was killed by her husband. MacDonald has shown in the past that her spirit literally follows the user’s heels.
In an attempt to make Lisa appear at “arbitrary XYZ coordinates”, MacDonald revealed a complete list of all possible points for a ghost to materialize, as well as the game logic for determining the specific location to do so.
Image source: X (Lance McDonald)
As it turned out, the place where Lisa appeared throughout the entire passage of P.T. is entirely defined by detailed hard-coded instructions: “No scripting language is used for this at all. Madness”.
The Fox Engine, on which P.T. is based, supports high-level programming languages, but in the case of Lisa they are not used: the authors limited themselves to C++. “It looks almost intentionally confusing,” says the modder.
Lisa’s teleportation moment that scared the hell out of MacDonald
Speaking to GamesRadar, MacDonald explained that game design is typically separated from the engineering side of a game, so seeing gameplay elements “hard-coded at the lowest level of the engine is extremely surprising.”
P.T. approaching its 10th anniversary – an interactive teaser was released on August 12, 2014 on PS4. Following the cancellation of Silent Hills, the demo was pulled from the PS Store. It is no longer possible to download the “sample”, and it is not compatible with the PS5, although MacDonald managed the impossible.