Konami Shuts Down P.T. Port, But Offers Dev an Internship

Konami is far from the most popular boy in the schoolyard right now. Before they broke ties with Kojima and decided it was more lucrative renting their IP to pachinko machines than actually making video games, they raised gamers' ire by releasing an amazing free horror demo called PT… and then removing it from the PlayStation Store and canceling the Silent Hill game that it was supposed to advertise. To this day, fans lament the passing of P.T., PS4’s with the demo installed on their system go for hundreds of dollars online, and there have been countless attempts to either port or recreate PT on other systems.

One of the more ambitious of these ports was being worked on by a 17-year-old developer working under the handle Qimsar, who was making exceptional progress bringing P.T. to the PC. He was doing such a good job, in fact, that it caught the attention of Konami.

In a blog post (via GameJolt), Qimsar said:
 

"I got a phone call that I was expecting at about 5:00 AM from someone who worked at Konami. He essentially told me that he was very sorry for being the bearer of bad news, but I would have to take down my remake. I was told that he and many other people at Konami saw and really liked my remake, but legit due to legal issues that were out of his or anybody else’s control really, he had to ask me to take down my remake project. I said that I would be willing to do so, and from there, the conversation went from really bad for me to, in my personal opinion (I’m sure you all will have differing opinions), really really good."

What made it really good? While Konami did have to take the demo down, they offered him one hell of a consolation prize: some free merch, but more importantly… an internship, while expressing a desire to go back to working on proper video games again.

He didn’t say if he accepted the internship or not, but even if he doesn’t, this is pretty cool. Hopefully it signals the start of a new era for Konami. Fingers crossed.