'Blade Runner' video game
While Blade Runner or its sequel, Blade Runner 2049, never set the world on fire, they have become some of the biggest cult-films in the entire sci-fi genre. However, many hardcore fans didn’t even know that a video game based on the series was released back in 1997 for the PC.
Earlier this year, Nightdive Studios (System Shock Remastered) announced that it would be working with Alcon Entertainment, the company that owns the Blade Runner series’s rights, to remastered the point-and-click adventure game based on the Blade Runner series. The company even released a comparison of the original opening with the remastered version of the game.
Alas, there’s bad news for those wishing to play the remastered game. In an interview with Eurogamer, Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick confirmed that Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition has been delayed to an unknown date. “There have been some obstacles we’ve had to overcome in terms of the old technology the game uses,” Kick said. “And our hunt for the original source code and assets have come up empty.”
It would seem that after EA purchased Westwood Studios, the original developers of Blade Runner, the original’s code was lost to time.
“We’ve had some discussions with EA about what else is in the vault they found regarding Blade Runner, and we haven’t been able to get a clear answer,” Kick told Eurogamer. “And even if there was something, it’s very unlikely they would release it to us for legal reasons, mostly, which is a bit of a disappointment, because we were hoping to at least get the original audio recordings. So we’re basically working off what was in the original game at this point and not having access to any original stuff.”
This means that the devs have to reverse engineer the code, which, according to Eurogamer, has become “an arduous and time-consuming task that involves creating tools to extract the original art assets.”
For now, if you want to check the original game out, you’ll have to buy it on GOG.com
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