Back in 1997, the sci-fi classic movie Blade Runner received a video game adaptation in the form of a point-and-click adventure. While based on Blade Runner, the game wasn’t an exact adaptation and instead was simply based in the same world. Instead, players followed Ray McCoy as they hunted down the replicants of the film in a storyline identical to the timeline of the film.
Developed by now-defunct Westwood Studios, who also developed the Command & Conquer franchise before their shutdown in ’03, it seemed that any chance of seeing the game again was mothballed along with the studio. However, Nightdive Studios and Alcon Entertainment are reportedly working on an enhanced remake of the title for release in the near future.
Nightdive Studios is a name you may recognize from their previous work in restoring video games. They’ve recently remastered Turok: Dinosaur Hunter in a Steam port that makes the game control better than it ever did before, and their System Shock remake was well-received as well.
Alcon Entertainment, meanwhile, are a film company known for a wide majority of titles between 1999 and today, with their last film coming out in 2019. They’ve released well-known films like The Blind Side, My Dog Skip, Insomnia, and, of course, Blade Runner 2049.
With Alcon having the license for the Blade Runner franchise and Nightdive having the gaming remaster know-how, the two have paired up to bring the 1997 title back to life. Of course, it isn’t all easy going. In 2015, for example, co-founder of Westwood Studios Louis Castle revealed that the original source code for Blade Runner had been lost during a move after EA purchased Westwood, making it impossible to remake the game without creating it from scratch.
Larry Kuperman of Nightdive had a different plan, though. According to him, the team “painstakingly reverse-engineered the code, importing it into our own KEX engine, a powerful tool that allows us to do console ports of classic titles, even in the face of quite challenging situations.” Kuperman, unfortunately, doesn’t reveal exactly how an engine like that works, but it’s good enough to know that it does!
With any luck, the release of a remaster of Blade Runner could trigger a resurgence of the series. Perhaps, given that Alcon is already involved, we’ll end up seeing something out of Blade Runner 2049 to boot? The future is unclear, but at least we know a remaster of Blade Runner will be in it!
