How to waste part of your life for no particular reason

Online games news Tedious Retro Gamer, 11-04-2022
Online Games Bay

No, it’s not gonna be another rant about people wasting their lives on making their own games, only to abandon them in messy state. Although, it kind of is...

Abandoned, a suppose title for Playstation, was hitting headlines last year because some people, based on hunches and too much time on their hands, were convinced it’s gonna be next Hideo Kojima game. Why?

Well, that is where the silly bit starts. There was 1:40 long teaser, which started the whole avalanche of silly ideas:

1. Blue Box Game Studios, the company behind that title, had square in its logo and similar square was found on the boxes on Death Stranding Director’s Cut. I mean, it’s not like squares usually are similar...

2. the game director of Abandoned, a Dutchman called Hasan Kahraman, has the same initials as Hideo Kojima! to be fair, so does Harvey Keitel, but somehow I doubt he is behind it

3. Kojima Productions Amsterdam is in Netherlands and Hasan Kahraman is from Netherlands

4. it’s gonna be a survival horror game and Hideo Kojima is famous for... Metal Gear Solid games, which has nothing to do with horror

5. Hideo Kojima was involved in P.T. "playable teaser", which actually was a horror "game" (because it was cancelled) and published it under pseudonym 7780s Studio

6. Hideo Kojima is sneaky and eccentric person, who would tease his games in unusual ways

7. Abandoned was mentioned on Playstation official blog as upcoming title and was suppose to be promoted in official media

8. in one of the ads they used barely seen image of face with eye patch in the background and main protagonist of Metal Gear Solid wore an eye patch

9. in the same ad they used a font very similar to the one in Metal Gear Solid

10. Hasan Kahraman mentioned on Twitter that they work on title "linked" with first letter S and the last L, which some people chose to accept that it will Silent Hills (which was a suppose title for full version of P.T.)

And that is more or less the "evidence" that kept some people busy for several weeks, and in some cases even months. What was the outcome? Abandoned was suppose to have a new teaser, which turns out to be few seconds long, it was suppose to be published in Q4 of 2021, and wasn’t.

In the meantime it was revealed that Hasan Kahraman is in fact a real person, who clearly spent more time on coming up with tricky marketing campaign than on making the actual game. In the past he was involved in similar titles that were more or less abandoned during production and this one, it seems, is no exception. What is more the original trailer was built on Unreal engine assets, so there is no way to tell if any part of the game actually exists so far.

And that is it. Or is it? Nope! Abandoned has returned in recent weeks with new drama - creators are removing tweets about the title! And the developers deny they have removed the tweets and they still work on Abandoned. And... who really cares?

It was all fun and games last year, when there were some doubts and people spent insane amount of time on proving it is a Hideo Kojima game or disproving it. Like that information had any real value. But now, a year later, I think it’s finally time to abandon the Abandoned and get on with your lives.

Let’s, for scientific reasons, assume it is in fact a new Hideo Kojima game. How does this information affect your life? Will you be able to sleep at nights knowing that Kojima is working on a new game? Will you sit by your computer / console and refuse to play any other title before Abandoned is finally here? What if the title will be postponed? What if it’s not gonna be any good? How do you cope with that?

There is whole world outside of your window, the lockdowns in most countries are over, you can do a lot of things other than spending weeks and months on speculations about one of the thousands of games that are in production - if Kojima is in fact working on Abandoned, he will tell you, when it’s gonna be published and you will be actually able to play it. But I guess I just don’t get it and the best bit of video games is now the speculations bit. After all it is info that will be exciting for... few minutes and then you will have to wait few years to actually play the game.

13-05-2022