Hideo Kojimas changed survival horror forever with a demo.

Would he have done the same with a full game?

Below, we look back at how even as a demo, it impacted the survival horror genre.

On August 12, 2014, players who downloaded P.T.

booted up the game and began their long walk to perdition, through a recursive hallway.

A bathroom door is cracked open, with a woman vaguely visible inside before it slams shut.

The next: A featureless woman stands in the hall before vanishing.

The next: The radio broadcast tells you, yes you, to turn around.

The lights are now dimming.

The squeak of the chandelier above replaces the radio broadcast.

The pictures on the dresser are increasingly scratched and torn.

Aside from the fetus, the horror was shockingly bloodless.

And yet, it was terrifying gamers around the planet.

The rest of the story is the stuff of legend now.

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Meanwhile, Konami all but gave P.T.

We were robbed of one of the most promising horror projects in gaming history.

is now its only enduring remnant–a mere demo, and its technologically imprisoned on the PS4.

But something terrible and wonderful has occurred in the decade since.

Survival-horror had grown stagnant by 2014.

The Last of Us and Telltales Walking Dead.

After 2014, the landscape would start developing an undercurrent.

Fear looked and felt different.

Horror in every moving medium has always leaned on disgust and surprise to be effective.

After P.T., game developers learned a word rarely employed with any degree of effectiveness prior: dread.

Suddenly, Hideo Kojima put that approach back in play on a grand scale.

There were no musical stings.

None of its horrors were telegraphed.

Junji Itos involvement was the ace here.

None of the safety rails to remind players theyre just playing a game.

This is your hole.

And in the years that followed, others would be emboldened to follow Kojimas lead.

It started almost immediately after Konami had P.T.

stricken from the PlayStation Store.

Multiple projects sprang up, eager to recreate P.T.

Recreation shortly gave way to elaboration, or at least a solemn attempt at it.

It was, at minimum, a story about a failing marriage, through indirect, distressing terms.

Ironically, maybe the most successful of P.T.s ideological progeny is 2017s Resident Evil 7.

Its the survival-horror equivalent of Taylor Swifts Folklore.

Players were trapped in a house in Middle of Nowhere, Louisiana.

It was a place of crumbling walls, rotting food, and dead bodies.

released, its clear they were emboldened by its very existence.

Games had been playing this particular mode before.

P.T.s release gave those ideas license to kill.

There is a hard question to ask, though: Would P.T.

have had such an impact if Silent Hills actually happened?

The closest analogue would be Alejandro Jodorowskys doomed adaptation of Dune inevitably inspiring the Lynch and Villeneuve iterations.

Silent Hills, very possibly, could have been imprisoned in a very different way.

As it stands now, P.T.s black, unfathomable spirit roams free.

has haunted the horror genre in games for a decade.

Those imitating or iterating on P.T.

are caretakers of ideas that only ever existed for a year.

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