Blade Runner: Time To Live was reportedly set to be a major game release, but even before it’s announced, it’s been cancelled.
If you think that it’s impossible to mourn the loss of something that you never had, you’re clearly haven’t found your way to Ridley Scott’s 1982 cyberpunk noir classic, Blade Runner. The film starred Harrison Ford as a weary and cynical cop tasked with tracking down and killing synthetic beings. Beings who would cling to the idea of life, even if – by our own human definition – ‘life’ was something they didn’t, and couldn’t, possess.
There’s a grim irony to this story then that like the story’s ‘replicants’, we find ourselves lamenting the loss of something we never even possessed, a new videogame that would have expanded the Blade Runner mythos.
According to Insider Gaming, the project was named Blade Runner: Time To Live, and was described as a “third-person, character focused, cinematic, action adventure” with a 10-12 hour single-player campaign.
Supermassive Games, the company behind the Until Dawn game (adapted as a feature film which released in the UK this week) and more recently The Quarry, was the developer behind the project. It was reportedly set for release in September of 2027.
The report states that the game would have taken place somewhere between Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 and the upcoming Amazon series, Blade Runner: 2099: “Set in the year 2065, players would play as a Blade Runner named So-Lange – someone who is also a vintage model Nexus-6 that is “inexplicably still alive well beyond your limited lifespan.”
We’ve even got a synopsis for the title and it sounds very compelling too:
“As you journey from the teeming undercity of New Zurich 2065 to the eerie remnants of the forgotten world beyond, you are under orders to retire Rev – the mysterious and ruthless leader of an underground replicant network. You are betrayed and left for dead in a brutally hostile environment.”
Just to be clear, this isn’t the announced Blade Runner game that is coming at some point from Annapurna Interactive. That one is titled Blade Runner: Labyrinth and as far as we know, is still coming along nicely (although Annapurna has had more than a few problems itself in the last 12 months). Labyrinth doesn’t yet have a release date, but you can check out the game’s listing on Steam here.
Still, imagine a world where we could have received two major Blade Runner video games in the space of a couple of years.
As for the reason as to the cancellation, the report suggests that rights owner Alcon Entertainment “was key to it” and the nixing of the game happened late last year. At least the studio has several other projects in the works, including Little Nightmares III and Directive 8020, a new entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology. These other works in progress will hopefully safeguard the company against the turbulence that the industry continues to face.
