It Looks Like We Found The Theranos Of Gaming: Blue Box

How does one fool a gamer? Hell, we've laughed off cosmetic paid DLC, dodged loot boxes, and will likely survive the NFT plague, but most of us share a weak spot – our blind hope to find Hideo Kojima secretly helming all mysterious video game projects out there. In June of 2021, we got to see the teaser for Abandoned. It only shows some very choppy footage of a forest and features a voice-over talking about a mysterious and possibly evil cult. Equally mysterious was the fact that Abandoned is made by Blue Box Game Studios, a team nobody knew anything about. If this had popped up on a random youtube channel, nobody would've cared, but the teaser showed up on Sony Playstation's actual blog. What kind of potential did Sony see here:

Gamers didn't see it either until someone came up with the deranged theory that this was actually Hideo Kojima announcing his next game, and the grey forest and the evil cult elements clearly pointed at a new Silent Hill title. Despite this naturally sounding completely wild for an outsider, Kojima fans know this is exactly what Kojima would do. What they didn't consider, however, was how Abandoned could just as well have been the work of somebody who knows how Kojima operates and wants in on the free marketing. Blue Box Game Studios quickly said they weren't Kojima's shadow ops dev team, which is nice, but also exactly what Kojima's actual shadow ops dev team would've said. In a very suspicious back and forth, they kept on releasing information that very obviously surfed the Kojima and Silent Hill waves.

The company continued to claim this was nothing but a very interesting coincidence, all the while announcing that they'd be showing more about the game soon to everyone who downloaded Abandoned's official app. An unknown developer having the gal to ask players to install an app to see more about a game when they could've just done it on youtube is messed-up enough, but it gets worse. The announcement came paired with a blurry picture of an eyepatch-wearing man, meaning that it alluded to Abandoned being not a Silent Hill title but a Metal Gear Solid one.

Game sleuths did some digging and concluded that the Big Boss stand-in was allegedly an asset that had been bought off another company, but this whole mess was already too deranged to ignore, so we caved in and got the app. The day of the big reveal arrived and, after hyping up the app so much, the only thing it was good for was a goddamn 5-second teaser that naturally doesn't really show anything.

And yet, it does look a lot like the reveal of the canceled Silent Hills from 2015.

Fast forward to a year after the first announcement, and Blue Box game studios is yet to show anything of substance. Gamespot has interviewed many people close to Hasan Kahraman, the director, and they all claim that the game isn't even real because Kahraman is allegedly just fooling everyone in search of funding for a game he doesn't even seem too interested in making. One could claim that Blue Box just isn't very good at making games – or previews that don't accidentally look like stuff made by Hideo Kojima, but it's hard to deny that they've been using the Kojima hype to keep on running up that Silent Hill.

Top Image: Blue Box