P.T. Hacker Discovers Headless Corpse Hidden In Game
Despite celebrating P.T.'s fifth birthday back in August, the game has kept on making headlines thanks to a hacker by the name of Lance McDonald, who's been poking around in the game's code, uncovering years-old secrets. He was the one, for instance, who discovered that the terrifying specter known as Lisa was actually following us the whole time during P.T. And now he's made another gruesome discovery; one you might want to brace yourself for.
In one of his more recent videos, McDonald managed to find a scene that we as players are never shown at all during P.T.'s short-yet-still-unsettling campaign: one with a decapitated corpse inside a filled-up bathtub. The headless body, by all indications, belongs to Lisa, who we discover later on in P.T. has been murdered by her husband. But aside from some audio of the murder occurring as P.T. draws to a close, we never see the act take place, nor do we ever see Lisa in any state but the one that haunts us throughout the game.
Why would Hideo Kojima and his team include the body if we as players never end up seeing it? This may come as a shock, given the grisly nature of P.T., but it's possible the body in the bathtub was a little too much for the demo. Either that, or after coming up with the path the player would follow in order to eventually unlock the end of the game, it was decided that the bathtub scene didn't fit with the rest of what P.T. was trying to accomplish.
Still, it's amazing that the corpse in the tub is present at all, isn't it? Rather than remove it from the game entirely, the team at Kojima Productions essentially flipped a switch to turn the corpse off so that it wouldn't show up. And believe it or not, that's not the only instance of such "switch flipping" that Lance McDonald found in P.T. In the same video that revealed the body in the bathtub, McDonald also showed us a number of other tricks the folks at Kojima Productions used to scare the living daylights out of us.
For example, in one portion of P.T., players can round a corner and briefly see Lisa at the end of a hallway before a light goes out. As it turns out, that Lisa model is always present in that one particular spot, and there is code in the game determining whether or not that model should be visible to the player. McDonald illustrated this by patching P.T. to keep that version of Lisa visible at all times. And it worked, so much so in fact that the first Lisa is still present when a second version of Lisa comes creeping through the door.
But that's not all, as McDonald also found another instance of the game flipping a switch and making something invisible. In P.T.'s opening cutscene, the camera looks from the ground to a door that is slightly ajar, and it appears a mysterious figure is staring through the crack of that door. When we eventually gain control of our character and the camera, however, the figure in the doorway is gone, and we're left to wonder: what was that? Thanks to McDonald's hacking skills, he was able to prevent the entity looking through the crack from disappearing. And upon going through the door and seeing what was on the other side, we learned the person staring at us at the very beginning of P.T. was — again — Lisa.
It seems positively insane that we're still learning secrets about this long-since-delisted teaser to Silent Hills, and that what amounts to a demo for a game that's been canceled is still giving us nightmares so many years later. If nothing else, it speaks to how truly influential P.T. was, and what a fully realized game could've meant for the horror genre. There are certainly other scary games out there we could play if we so chose, but nothing feels like it can match the mystery of what's going on in P.T. Long story short: we are convinced there are more secrets to be found within this game. And, hopefully, hackers like Lance McDonald keep searching for them.
Should more P.T.-related news make the rounds, we'll let you know.