Popular teaser for the cancelled video game Silent Hills, P.T. took the video game audience by storm when it was released, despite the heavy praise it earned, it was cancelled by the company supporting the project, Konami, this lead to the company attempting to remove P.T. from its storefront as it fired the lead behind the project. Now as the Play Station 4 was the main console for P.T. much like many other Play Station 4 games it could be ported onto the Play Station 5, however recently it had been changed, in that P.T. can only be played on the PS4 and cannot be moved from the PS4 to the PS5, many users who have already ported the game over reported no issues running the game nor did they notice any particular issues, Sony did release warnings prior that some games would not be compatible with the PS5 however there had been no inclusion of P.T. in the list. Thus a few modders have seen it as their mission to port P.T. many with the intention of preserving the game, considering it to be art, and art being valuable they uphold the idea that it should be protected and preserved if possible, as losing it would be the same as losing many hours of work from dedicated artists. Despite the PS5’s security giving the hackers issues, they have recently released footage showing P.T. working on their PS5, leading to a discussion about emulation and video game preservation.
Many argue that video game emulation is a crime that’s related to piracy of video games, however emulation also enables the means at which video games that are no longer being supported by their developers, have stopped being placed on sale by the publishers, or are only accessible on hardware that no longer is available to the general public, then emulation allows the preservation of these video games, effectively preventing them from being unplayable in the future and from being forgotten, similarly to how films are forgotten in modern day, with many failing to be preserved if they did not make it big in the box office, this leads to many works being removed entirely from the future. The modder used an exploit tool developed to jailbreak the PS5 by breaking the system’s means of detecting tampering, and then using the now hacked and modified system installed P.T. by porting the P.T. file the modder originally owned and had purchased legally, however, had encountered an issue, where they speculate that there is a blacklist within the PS5 for certain games, because even with the license to play the game and with the game installed properly, they could not get the game to run on their PS5, given how this procedure works on the PS4 to run multiple games, it shows that there have been methods to prevent individuals from playing games like P.T., this has resulted in few individuals being dissatisfied with how this shows an active attempt to prevent the preservation of media, when approached for question, a Sony spokesperson regarded the problem with P.T.’s compatibility with the PS5 as a “developer’s problem”, leading many to point their frustration at Konami, Konami themselves have remained silent during this time as the story continues to develop.
Felipe Nathaniel L. Uy
Sources for this article:
- McDonald, L. (2022, October 4). Tweet. Twitter. Retrieved October 23, 2022, from
https://twitter.com/manfightdragon/status/157712525330986188 - McWhertor, M. (2020, November 6). P.T. is not playable on PlayStation 5. Polygon.
Retrieved October 23, 2022, from https://www.polygon.com/2020/11/6/21549228/pt-
ps5-backward-compatible-playable-playstation-5 - Specter. (2022, October 9). Tweet. Twitter. Retrieved October 23, 2022, from
https://twitter.com/SpecterDev/status/1578975412335828993
