Abandon All Hope

 Ye who buy into this nonsense

Time, work, and that all important, ever limited, creative passion has been sunk in droves towards bringing to life your greatest project yet, something which has taken years of off your life and turned the very heads of an entire industry of fans who have never even noticed your existence before. You blush under their new-found glare, embarrassed that after all this time the attention you've longed for has fallen your way. You don't know how to act. You should probably be humble, but who doesn't love it when you put on a little bit of a show? Tease the crowds a little, let them dream about a grander world and their imagination can do all the marketing you could wish for. Yes, just feed them snippets and it'll work wonders down the line! A little screenshot here, a little flirtatious tweet there. Oh, you know! You can tease the name of the game in question, because the title 'Abandoned' was just a placeholder anyway. That would go great along with the trailer of a camera wandering through the woods. Hmm, yes you'll tease 'First letter S, last letter L' what could possibly go- huh? Now everybody thinks you're Hideo Kojima and the game you're making is Silent Hill? Well crap.

If you're Hasan Kahraman from Dutch Studio Blue Box Games, I can only imagine your experience over the past year has been something like that. Burgeoning promise waylaid by being dragged into the imagination of the Internet over an illusionary ARG that everybody has fooled themselves into being a part of, your reward for wanting to play the marketing game with a hand close to your chest. I've touched on this situation briefly, and aside from the fact that Hideo Kojima himself still refuses to weigh in and put all of this to rest, (Maybe he just enjoys watching the torture from the sidelines) I've yet to see a single sliver of compelling evidence telling us that this Hasan man is Kojima or that Blue Box is secretly a fake company working on Silent Hill. I mean sure, Hideo Kojima did kind of do something similar with the whole 'Moby Dick Games' thing and 'The Phantom Pain', but people forget how obviously on-the-nose that was. Though we might not have know it was Kojima the whole time, it was clear that something was up the second the lead developer started doing interviews with a face entirely wrapped in bandages. 

But that hasn't stopped this crazy conspiracy from spreading. People have even turned to the almighty god-king of the internet, Google Translate, to see the irrefutable evidence that Kahraman translates directly into Hideo should you try it out! Of course, that could be because both names translate to 'hero', a rather common etymological route for names to come out of, but when you're in 'conspiracy mode' the logical explanation can fly out of the window a little bit. Maybe the only actual bit of this that had any traction, however, was the unique App experience which was launching before this Abandoned game and would hopefully clear up some misconceptions about what the game was. Upon learning of this, folk immediately starting asking how it was that an indie game studio could cook up an App-companion for a game that made it onto the Sony Store. And that's- actually a good question. That's by no means common, Sony is notoriously rough to indie studios, maybe they know something that we don't.

Of course, logical reasoning might say that this could easily be the results of some out-of-box marketing, but I think the conspiracy train has rolled far beyond such sensible conclusions at this point; it's conspiracy or death. And so this App became the beating heart, pushing past all the naysayers and fuelling every part of this nonsense, even becoming the central talking point of an entire subreddit dedicated to this perceived 'mystery'. Everything would immediately become clear upon looking at this App fully released, and all those that scoffed would feel silly when they realised how all of the wood-like imagery, ponderous shots and desolation matched up perfectly with the Silent Hill franchise. Blue Box themselves seemed very happy for attention to shift away from their legitimacy as a real games company, posting a teaser riling everybody up despite it featuring nothing but some floorboards and a man walking across them in a such a weird angle that you can see practically nothing of worth. But forget that, the launch of the App is here.

And so are the technical troubles, of course, isn't that just the way? You plan this out for months, grow a larger traction than you ever expected, and then technical difficulties come out of nowhere to kick you in the nether regions. It took some behind the scenes work, some apologetic tweets, but after a little bit of time, but eventually the App was back online with a small teaser introducing people to what the thing would hold in the months to come. And in that very moment the spell over the Internet was broken, although probably not in the way that Blue Box intended. For you see, the teaser I just mentioned, was exactly the Twitter video they had tweeted out just before, and the App itself had nothing else on it but placeholders for future content. Which is to say, this App had nothing of value to anyone, and I suppose people finally realised that not even Hideo Kojima would string people along that much.

It's actually quite astounding to see the tide of opinion shift so heavily over the course of a single night, as though all hopes were riding on some impossible reveal moment where the perfect Silent Hill game would materialise in front of you and all would be right with the world once again. Hideo Kojima and Konami, the two who left on such bad terms that Konami tried to literally scrub his name from the boxes of all their games, would just shake hands and partner-up like nothing had ever gone wrong. It was a pipe dream, and one which these theorists had fed themselves for months without any good reason to do so. Blue Box tried to insist that they had nothing to do with Kojima or Silent Hill, Hasan tried to convince the world that he was a real person, but people needed to have their highest hopes built up and knocked down like a jenga tower before the cold realisation could dawn on them. They had wasted their time.

It's almost with vindictive glee that the same parties who bought into this in the first place are now ripping into Blue Box's past to now tear it all apart. Previously those who wanted to point out how insane all of this was, would simply point towards the history of smaller scale Horror games that Blue Box had already debuted, pointing out that Hideo Kojima would have to have been cooking this twist-surprise up since one year after the initial Silent Hills reveal all those years back. Which would be surprising given that since then he'd been ejected from the company and created a whole new studio and IP. Now people have dug into the history of Blue Box as a developer and pointed out certain projects of thiers that have disappeared or been sold off, trying to paint this picture of Blue Box being an unreliable company with big promises and nothing to back it up. (Which certainly does seem to line up with evidence a little more, but I can't help but shake the bad taste in my mouth of people ganging up to punch down on an Indie Studio they themselves put on a pedestal.)

And so this, in the mind of me, ends the sage of Abandoned, because I think it's pretty clear that this isn't the grand Kojima prank which the world so desperately wanted it to be. I gave this topic a wide berth at first, not interested in the harassment of a small indie dev, but now we've gone through the length of the saga and they've benefitted from a boost to marketing that no-one could have predicted, I feel more comfortable summarising this wild journey. And for those that are still holding on, clinging to vague 'evidences' and pointing to the fact that images and shots of this game match up with the weird woods around Silent Hill in the lore, I posit thus; "Most horror games of the day look identical to one-another". And that's just a fact. I hope Blue Box aren't going to let this dying of momentum kill their game, and can salvage some of the lingering attention into a semi-successful marketing campaign, and that maybe Silent Hill fans will be able to fine themselves some contentment out of the chaos. Until the next stupidity to strike the gaming world, I guess.