Victims of Digital Distribution – Games You Can't Buy Anymore
When a game released exclusively digitally disappears from distribution, it becomes impossible to play it legally. Actually, quite a few gems have disappeared in this manner, with the legendary P.T. being just the beginning of the story.
Table of Contents
- Victims of Digital Distribution – Games You Can't Buy Anymore
- P. T.
- Selected games from Telltale
- Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD
- OutRun Online Arcade
- Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game
- GTI Club+: Rally Cote D’Azur
- WiiWare
- Flappy Bird
P. T.
P. T., or Playable Teaser, came out of nowhere. The game was displayed at Sony's 2014 gamescom conference advertising it as the debut of 7780s studio, and shortly thereafter, a playable teaser of the game was made available for PlayStation 4 holders to download. Despite being barely a sample of something bigger, the title impressed with its visuals, overwhelming atmosphere and novel ideas, fantastically refreshing the formula of survival horror. Observing the events from a first-person perspective, we explored successive iterations of the terrifying house and, by solving environmental puzzles, learned the scraps of a very dark history. The free sample was almost able to stand on its own as a game, especially since completing it without hints was not an easy thing to do and could take quite a while.
When the first players completed P. T. and bragged online about what they had seen at the end, few people believed them. Eventually, however, the story checked with more and more players. 7780s never actually existed. P. T. was an ingenious foreshadowing of a new installment of the legendary Silent Hill. Created by Hideo Kojima himself, already a legend, who'd given players the Metal Gear series. In collaboration with Guillermo del Toro, and with Norman Reedus as the protagonist. It sounded like a dream come true.
The dream quickly turned into a nightmare. Kojima's conflict with Konami led to the Japanese corporation deciding to bin Silent Hills, and, consequently, also P.T. The game was not only unavailable on PlayStation Store – even people, who'd already registered the game with their accounts weren't able to download it, and that doesn't happen often. As a result, the few consoles with P. T. installed are to this day a rarity for real collectors. The game itself has received several remakes from loyal fans, which Konami regularly blocks. Kojima's innovative ideas have not gone unnoticed and found many followers – echoes of the Playable Teaser can be traced in Allison Road or Layers of Fear. The game itself, however, remains only available to those who have already downloaded it and keep it on their PS4's hard drives.
A sad anecdote: I didn't buy a PS4 early enough for P. T., but I did manage to assign the game to my account before it was removed from the store. To this day, every now and then, I try to download it, fooling myself that maybe someone at Konami came to their senses and un-deleted it. Never works.
