Summary

• Three years ago, Blue Box Game Studios announced the first-person "cinematic survival sim" Abandoned.
• It immediately went viral as many speculated that it was secretly a Hideo Kojima game, maybe even Silent Hill.
• However, this game dropped off the face of the Earth two years ago along with its studio.

Three years ago, Netherlands-based developer Blue Box Game Studios announced a “cinematic survival sim” called 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Abandoned. It was supposed to launch later that same year, but internet conspiracy theories spiralled this project into a level of virality꧑ that CEO Hasan Kahraman could have never anticipa🌳ted.

Speculation that it was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a secret Hideo Kojima game wrapped in a fake company ran rampant, with many believing that he had returned to Konami to work on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Silent Hill after their infamous fallout, fuelled by Geoff Keighley’s support of the newly announced game and the trailer being hosted by the official PlayStation YouTube channel. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Kojima and Kahraman both denied this.

The project was then delayed into 2022 as Blue Box announced a demo and PT-like prologue to satiate our appetite in the meantime. 2022 came and went, and the studio became a ghost. You might think that it’s simply stuck in development hell. Perhaps like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hollow Knight: Silksong we’ll hear about it when the developer is ready. But no. Abandoned has bee🎀n abandoned.

All Contact Has Been Cut Off At Blue Box Game Studios

Digging into the aftermath of this🐟 strange internet mystery that gripped us in the thralls of the Covid pandemic, all I found were breadcrumbs leading to nothing. Firstly, the website has been down since May 2022, with a vague promise that “We will be right back!”. Obviously, that didn’t happen. There was originally a note at the bottom saying th🌸at Blue Box loved its supporters, but this has since been removed, along with the email contact.

In its place ꦉnow sits a box to enter your own email for a newsletter. I signed up to this a few weeks ago, but that too led nowhere. The promise that “We will be right back!” was also swapped for a much less time-pressing “We are updating the website” at the end of 2022. Reaching out to its old contact email for more information nets you a ‘Message blocked’ error. Its Twitter has been inactive for two years, its Instagram purged, so DMing these accounts led to no reply. Hasan Kahraman has deleted his LinkedIn, and calling the Blue Box Game St༺udios phone number reveals that it was deactivated.

Every single means of contact is blocked off. Blue Box Game Studios is a spiraling labyrin♐th of dead ends, leaving behind a game that we will never play.

Digging Into Blue Box Game Studios’ History

According to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:insiders close to Abandoned’s developm𝔍e♓nt, Kahraman put the project on hold two years ago so that he c🐭ould raise more funding. His key goal was to relea🍬se the prologue while he gained those funds, but the same insiders claimed that he didn’t “seem to be in a hurry”. Two years later, there’s no prologue and Blue Box Game Studios has disappeared, but it’s not surprising given the company’s history.

Blue Box Game Studios was founded in 2014 as a software pu🅘blisher with only 11 to 20 developers. It started drumming up hype for its new game Rewind just a year later. Described as a “mysterious horror game" for PC, Oculus, and consoles, it was an unrealistically ambitious pitch for a brand-new studio without a publisher attached.

You would play as paranormal investigator Jim Walker, communicati🌺ng with ghosts via an EVP to solve puzzles. Blue Box promised 30 side stories, different endings, a dynamic narrative, and evꩲen VR support. To get the wheels turning, Blue Box launched to raise funds, but the playable teaser it had promised its new fans was immediately delayed.

Things picked up though; it was greenlit on Steam, launched a now🤡-deleted playable trailer on , and announced three DLC packs for those who pledged €25 (along with online co-op). But then Blue Box shut the Kicks൩tarter down because it had supposedly acquired a “private investor” who was going to fully fund the game. Faith was at an all-time low as delays had mounted, the VR mode had been cancelled, and little was being shown that lived up to those grandiose promises.

Rewind was aﷺll but dead, with little more than an empty pledge that it was still in development. But then Blue Box announce🍷d The Lost Tape, going back to the original concept of Rewind.

We are still in 2015 at this point, which means that in a single year, Blue Box announced a game, delayed it, launched a Kickstarter, cancelled the campꦗaign, scaled back the scope, and announced an en𓃲tirely new game based on the first.

That means we have The Lost Tape and Rewind: Voices of the Past being developed at once by a small indie studio that had yet to launch a single game. To make matters worse, 𓃲it couldn’t find a publisher, and so it was trying to self-publish these two horror games, aiming for later that year in 2015 for The Lost Tape, and 2016 a year later f💃or Rewind.

The Lost Tape is a paranormal invest🍬igation game that used to be the older game concept of Rewind. Ever since we changed Rewind to be a cinematic experience, The Lost Tape has become the original game.

2016 came and went without either releasing. The Lost Tape was listed🦄 on ModDB as having “ceased development”, and Rewind was rebranded in 2017 "instead of cancelling the game".

Now called The Whisperer the scope was once again unbelievably unrealistic. Blue Box promised it would be an enormous “open world” with two player online co-op and VR support. Then it was rebranded to Unseen Faces in 2018. This kept going and going and going until finally the studio launc🦩hed The Haunting in 2020.

It’s an early access Steam game you cannot buy anymore (purchase was "temporarily disabled" three years ago), and while it never launched on PlayStation, . Reviews discuss the litany of ga🔥me breaking bugs and poor facial animations, the awful narrative, and the men꧒us breaking as they plummet players into a black screen. “This game has never worked” reads one review. The Haunting was also abandoned.

Ten Years Later And Blue Box Game Studios Is Gone

After finally releasing the first-person horror game it had been hyping up for five years with promises it could never deliver, Blue Box announced Abandoned and broke containment. It had reached a much wider audience, propelled by the Silent Hill mystery that many accused Kahraman of fuelling. Its p🎶ast of broken promises and an unplayable game it had only launched a year prior were swept aside in the internet storm—there’s no way PlayStation and Geoff Keighley would platfor꧋m a scam, right?

It’s tongue-in-cheek, announcin🎀g a game called Abandoned mere months after abandoning your previous broken early access game you charged €19.99 for. Yet Abandoned’s early delays, consistent with Blue Box’s past, were shrugged off as an expectation in the pandemic, as many fans unaware of any of these past failures jumped to Kahraman’s defence. One glance at this company’s history reveals a familiar pattern that Abandoned was following almost to ꧟the letter, and it was never going to live up to the triple-A horror it was teasing with its mere 11 to 20 developers.

Much like every other Blue Box Studios game, Abandoned was abandoned. The only difference this time is that﷽ the studio itself was 𝓀abandoned, too.