After confirming that Norman Reedus was in fact your character in the P.T. demo, Lance McDonald has been able to further crack the demo and allow players to venture outside of the house for the first time. McDonald was able to break free of the endless loop in the house by once again manipulating the game’s code. Originally, the demo linked together separate map files, allowing different variations of the same hallway. McDonald changed the code in this process and swapped in the code for the street, since it’s all rendered in-game for that final cutscene.
It becomes apparent quite quickly that Kojima and company never intended the player to get outside of the house, as there’s no collision outside of the house. The player will simply fall beneath the “earth” and continues falling until Lisa appears out of nowhere and strangles the player to death, thereby resetting the game.
McDonald was able to remedy this by again manipulating the camera, allowing him to continue on down the street. The result allowed him to see not only the rest of the street, but other streets, as well. It’s not an amazing revelation, as you might guess, as the streets are just lined with different kinds of garbage or worn down construction equipment. Nevertheless, it’s all under a creepy shroud of darkness, and it’s also quite cool to see just how much of a demo Kojima was able to craft.
“I found it fairly amazing to have a chance to explore a somewhat entirely new physical space in P.T., something handcrafted by the team at Kojima Productions while in-house at Konami as an official part of the mainline Silent Hill series,” says McDonald. “While there’s no way to tell what the future holds, this may be the final canonical rendition of Silent Hill ever to exist, so I hope you feel that I helped in some way today by giving you a chance to explore along with me.”
