The classic horror game P.T. is getting a much-needed PC port

Kojima's canceled "playable trailer" no longer stuck on several old PS4 hard drives.

Kojima's discontinued "playable trailer" is no longer stuck on some old PS4 hard drive.

Believe it or not, I didn't have to use a PS4 to produce this screenshot.

For over a decade now, the only "official" way to play Hideo Kojima's cult classic, P.T. – the long-stalled “playable trailer” for Kojima’s canceled Silent Hills project – via one of the increasingly rare PlayStation 4s, having already downloaded a copy during its months-long window of availability. However, now a coder is helping save the game with a porting tool that creates a playable x86 PC from the original PS4 files.

Coder Lorean Xavier said he was inspired to work on the "P.T. for PC" project "because P.T. deserved to exist somewhere other than the consoles that still have it installed." The open source porting effort rebuilds P.T. In C++ and Vulkan, the engine recreates "every level, model, texture, sound, script, and cutscenes," according to the GitHub listing, using the original PS4 game files. This means that players without their legal decrypted copy of the original P.T. You'll need to track one down to produce a playable PC version.

Relying on actual P.T. files makes this port more authentic than previous attempts by enthusiasts to recreate the look and feel of P.T. For PC audiences and while PS4 emulators have only recently reached the point where they can run P.T. In full, this native port also includes additional features such as upscaling and framerate generation, camera mode, third-party and VR demo support, and a "Museum" section where you can look at and listen to in-game assets (including "unused content").

"I'm a solo developer making a free P.T port because I love the game," he added. "No one hired me or asked me to spend countless hours on this. I'm sharing something I worked so hard on just because I want others to enjoy it."

In addition to being of interest to curious gamers who never had access to the extremely limited PS4 version, this port of P.T. It should be of great help to conservationists who want to preserve public access to this historically important game for generations to come. Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology and Film and Media Collections at Stanford University Libraries, told Ars in 2015: “Personally...I think super hardware solutions are a dead end to preservation. "The kinds of equipment/hardware that we have, the way they're manufactured, there's just a very small chance of surviving for a very long time."

Kyle Orland has been the senior gaming editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, technology, and culture behind video games. He holds degrees in journalism and computer science from the University of Maryland. He once wrote an entire book about Minesweeper.