Kojima's PT, the scariest game that never was, still has secrets to reveal.
Lance McDonald is a hacker and YouTuber who's long been at the forefront of the effort to uncover as much as there is to know about PT. He's the one that first discovered the terrifying stalker Lisa is quite literally always behind you while you're playing the game. I've been covering McDonald's PT discoveries, including a disturbing unused bathroom scene and Lisa's highly distressing offscreen behavior, for almost five years, and now, a full 10 years from the game's release, he's still sharing some truly fascinating information.
In a recent tweet, McDonald says he was toying around with PT's code in an effort to make Lisa spawn at "arbitrary XYZ coordinates," and in doing so he uncovered the full list of all of her possible spawn points as well as the game logic used to determine where she appears. It turns out that where Lisa spawns throughout the course of a playthrough is determined entirely by detailed instructions directly hard-coded into the game file. "No scripting language is used whatsoever for any of it," McDonald says. "Insane."
Speaking with 12DOVE, McDonald elaborated: "Usually gameplay design is abstracted from the engineering side of the game. Typically the puzzle or campaign designers are given easy-to-use tools so they can work on the art of game design without the worries of working so close to the metal where they might accidentally impact gameplay performance or cause deep issues with the engine. To see gameplay such as 'where does Lisa spawn,' 'what causes her to spawn,' 'how does she decide when to attack' etc all be hard-coded at the lowest level of the game engine is very surprising."
McDonald says in a follow-up tweet that Konami's Fox Engine, which PT was built in, supported high-level programming languages "and has an XML-like system for laying out gimmicks as well, but none of that is used for any of the puzzles or anything related to Lisa at all. They kept it all in pure C++ and compiled it straight into the engine. Wild ... Like they don’t even define her spawn points in the map file. They’re just a big list of XYZ coordinates stored in constants in the exe. Feels almost deliberately obfuscated."
This is a little more 'in the weeds' than McDonald's past PT revelations, but it nonetheless comes as a reminder that Kojima's 2014 teaser is still just as frightening as it ever was. While digging around with PT's code, McDonald made his player character teleport to each of Lisa's spawn points, but at one point it placed him just outside one of the hallways looking in through the window, and it just so happened Lisa was standing outside the window right next to him, spasming unnaturally as she so often does.
"I had the sound muted because I'm always scared of jump scares when teleporting out of bounds so I didn't realize she was right there until I turned the camera," McDonald says. "Made me jump."
I always get a little misty-eyed writing about PT, especially now that we're a decade removed from its release, but as long as we have people like McDonald unraveling the many mysteries behind its development, at least its spirit can be kept alive. "There are many myths around PT that are difficult to dispel from the perspective of a player, so I like to look at the actual game code to find definitive answers," McDonald says.
In the meantime, here are the best horror games you can play right now.
