Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Konami would prefer it if gamers everywhere just forgot about PT and the game it was promoting, Silent Hills. The publisher removed PT from the PlayStation Store in late April and then officially canceled Silent Hills a day later. Now, Konami has completely removed PT from Sony’s servers, preventing players from re-downloading the demo if they delete it from their PS4. Needless to say, fans are unhappy with Konami’s treatment of the franchise and the three men who were working to bring it back (Hideo Kojima, film director Guillermo Del Toro, and actor Norman Reedus).
Others, like Offworld’s Leigh Alexander, are lamenting the death of the Silent Hill franchise as we know it. Specifically the weird and off-kilter little town that was created by weird and off-kilter people. The Silent Hill series may continue, but it won’t be the same:
We just don’t have that anymore, now that video games make so much sense, so much business sense. They are so eloquently risk-averse, these days. For fear of needlessly glorifying a prior era, though, a couple of years ago I played through Silent Hill 2 again, to see how it ‘held up.’ I expected its quirks and flaws to loom large with time. I expected to be a little embarrassed at how much it had transported and impacted a younger me.
But somehow it was better and more beautiful.
And in a rare Insert Quarter two-fer, Polygon’s Nick Robinson looks into the efforts fans are going to to keep PT alive, including selling the game on eBay (actually, selling a PS4 console with the game installed on it). Robinson also muses on how Konami’s attempt to kill it has only made PT a bigger part of the conversation among gamers:
Of course, P.T. isn’t actually going anywhere; the game was downloaded over one million times, which means it’s backed up across over one million hard drives and SSDs in over one million PlayStation 4s all over the world. In reality, the game is not going to truly disappear — at least not until those hard drives start failing. But even then, Konami’s attempts to restrict access to P.T. are foolish, because copies will be made and encryption barriers will be broken. The coolest part, though, isn’t just that Konami failed — it’s how spectacularly the company’s plan has backfired.
Both articles are available for your perusal at Offworld and Polygon.
