And the saga of Abandoned continues. Three days after BLUE BOX had “technical issues” launching the patch for the Abandoned Realtime Experience app, the developer has now deleted all tweets about the issues. In fact, the most recent tweet still available is the five-second teaser video showing a man’s legs walking into a lit doorway with the comment “Are you ready?” that the team posted just prior to the Abandoned Realtime Experience launch that never occurred on August 10th.
The deleted tweets include the most recent set in which BLUE BOX Game Studios insisted they are “100% real” and working on something they are all very passionate about. At the same time, internet sleuths have started digging up BLUE BOX’s history, which shows a pattern of “abandoned” games—titles that get announced and publicized but never actually end up finished or seeing the light of day. These same projects were once used as evidence in the grand conspiracy theories that BLUE BOX and Abandoned were actually Hideo Kojima and Silent Hill, but now it seems they paint a very different picture: that BLUE BOX’s Abandoned is just a small indie project may not ever actually release.
Curiously, the tweet deletions come shortly after the BLUE BOX Game Studios website got an update with a message stating “The issue has been resolved. The patch will be live in a few hours.” However, BLUE BOX’s official Twitter account hasn’t acknowledge the same information and as of now (which is more than a few hours after that message went live on the site), the patch is still not live. It still displays the “Check back soon..” message when you try to launch it. The BLUE BOX website also periodically displays 503 errors, but can be viewed sporadically.
While original conspiracy theories had proposed that the delay was just a ruse to release it on August 12—P.T.’s anniversary—that obviously didn’t happen. The theories shifted to a release date of August 13th for the obvious horror implications of “Friday the 13th.” However, unless the patch comes sometime later today, it seems that won’t be it either, and that there is nothing more behind this other than some poor communication around the ongoing issues that BLUE BOX is facing. At this point, interested fans are getting bored and frustrated. Curiosity is beginning to wane, and there’s a lot of skepticism about the team’s ability to create a game when you look at the studio’s history and its apparent inability to even release an app for non-interactive trailers that has been delayed numerous times already.
