PT is gone. It’s probably never coming back. But Farhan Qureshi, an aspiring game developer from Calgary, has rebuilt it. And seriously — screenshot for screenshot — this is almost indistinguishable from the original.
According to Qureshi, the project was part of a 3D modelling workshop he was planning to teach this September. Purely an exercise — could he do it? How close could he come to recreating PT? The initial idea was to create a simple apartment, but since the workshop was aimed at game developers he decided to go for something a little more gaming focused. Also: PT is no longer available for download. Why not recreate it?
His first step: take a whole lot of reference pictures. He did this by using the PS4 share button and uploading the pics to Twitter. Qureshi has a dummy twitter account full of them.
Next step: actually modelling the infamous PT hallway itself. Qureshi used a combination of borrowed PT textures of textures from online sources to create the hallway, and added a series of different filters to build that unique PT ‘feel’. It looks incredible.
Hilariously, according to his account, the most difficult part of re-modelling the hallway was the phone. The twisting phone cord made for a serious set of challenges that only a 3D modeller could really understand. He had more trouble making a phone cord, he says, than he did creating the ‘Lisa’ character model, which appears in Qureshi’s reconstruction of PT.
Qureshi actually ended up with a playable version of PT. Asides from a few dimension changes, the space itself is near perfect. The game is playable and actually features many of the key events from the original version of PT.
The game itself is available for download here, but as you might expect the demand is high and Qureshi’s dropbox has been flooded with download attempts. Hos account has been temporarily disable because of the overwhelming traffic. Hopefully there will be another upload soon, because I am super curious to play through this.
Qureshi is looking for work and if this is anything to go by, he’s pretty damn good at what he does. He estimates his version of PT took around 104 hours in to create. That seems… insane. He created it over four weeks.
Wow.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku Australia, where Mark Serrels is the Editor. You can follow him on Twitter if you’re into that sort of thing.